Locally, people call it "the Lios", a name derived from the Irish word for a fairy fort or enclosed space, and that folk usage is often a more reliable guide to a site's antiquity than any official designation.

The feature is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. A rath typically consisted of a circular earthen bank, sometimes with an external ditch, enclosing a farmstead or high-status residence, most likely in use somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. At Phale, the enclosure measures roughly 29 metres across on a NNW-ESE axis, and the bank has survived largely because it was absorbed into the existing field fence system, making it inadvertently useful to successive generations of farmers rather than an obstacle to be cleared. Inside, the ground is crossed by cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis, the kind of lazy-bed pattern associated with spade-dug potato or grain cultivation, suggesting the interior was worked at some point long after the original structure fell out of use as a settlement. The heavy overgrowth on the bank itself is typical of sites that have been left undisturbed for generations but never formally protected.