What remains is a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically during the first millennium AD, in which a family and their livestock sheltered within an earthen bank and fosse. Here the enclosure measures thirty-nine metres across, north to south, and while that is a fairly modest scale, it is enough to suggest a working homestead rather than anything ceremonial.

The earthworks have not fared well over the centuries. The surrounding bank, which would once have stood as a substantial defensive or boundary feature, has been largely reduced to a scarp, a slope rather than a proper upstanding wall of earth, reaching somewhere between two and three metres in height at its best-preserved points. A shallow external fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure, survives only faintly. Most telling, perhaps, is the causewayed entrance on the south-east side, a gap two metres wide where the builders left the fosse uncut to allow access, a detail that has outlasted much of the rest of the structure. The choice of location is characteristic of rath construction across Ireland; a hillside base with a commanding view down into a river valley offers both practical drainage and a degree of visibility over the surrounding land.