The trees were planted inside an early medieval ringfort, a rath, which is the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside. Thousands were built, mostly between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household. This one at Moneygaff sits on a west-facing slope, its circular enclosure spanning 30 metres across, drawn in by an earthen bank that still stands 2.1 metres high in places and is stone-faced in parts, suggesting a degree of permanence and effort in its original construction.

What makes this site worth pausing over is how much of the original form has survived, if in an altered state. The external fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, is still traceable to the south-east, though it has been reduced over centuries to something resembling a field drain. A laneway now cuts through the interior, entering through gaps in the bank on the south-east and west sides, repurposing the enclosure as a throughway long after its inhabitants were gone. Most intriguingly, in the north-west quadrant of the interior, a smaller circular feature survives: a hut site roughly 7.5 metres in diameter, defined by its own low bank of earth and stone. This would have been the actual dwelling space within the fort, a structure modest in scale but legible enough in outline to give a sense of the domestic life once organised within these earthworks.

The conifer planting across the interior complicates any reading of the ground surface today, obscuring what might otherwise be visible underfoot, but the bank itself remains the thing to look for. Walking the perimeter, particularly to the south-east where the fosse still reads in the landscape, gives the clearest impression of how deliberately this enclosure was shaped into the hillside.