To an untrained eye it reads as a slightly raised, circular patch of scrub in the middle of farmland, but the geometry is deliberate and very old. The roughly circular area measures approximately 44 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west, defined by an earthen bank two to three metres wide and still standing around 0.8 metres above the surrounding ground. Outside that bank, a flat-bottomed fosse, the technical term for a defensive ditch, remains visible at the north-north-west and south-west, around three metres wide and 0.35 metres deep.

Ringforts, also known as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings within a circular earthen or stone boundary. They were built and occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular example sits in a low-lying stretch of landscape tucked between drumlins, the elongated glacial hills that define so much of counties Leitrim and Cavan, and lies roughly 35 metres from a north-east to south-west section of the Ballinamore and Ballyconnell Canal. That waterway, a nineteenth-century navigation connecting the River Shannon to the River Erne, is now used as part of the Shannon-Erne Waterway. The coincidence of an ancient enclosure and a relatively modern canal cutting across the same quiet corridor of land is quietly arresting. Part of the rath's bank has been absorbed into a later field boundary on the eastern and southern sides, which is common enough where agricultural land has been worked continuously for centuries and older earthworks get pressed into service as convenient dividers.