That scale alone is notable; most ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, run considerably smaller. Two earthen banks with a wide, shallow fosse between them, a fosse being a ditch dug to reinforce the defensive or territorial effect of the banks, define the perimeter. Or they once did, comprehensively. Walk the eastern arc today and the picture is less complete, the inner bank levelled and the fosse filled in, leaving that stretch flattened into the surrounding field.

What makes the site particularly readable as a landscape document is the layering of different periods of use. Inside the enclosure, faint traces of cultivation ridges run roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, suggesting the interior was at some point turned over to agricultural use, probably during one of the phases of intensive tillage that characterised post-medieval Westmeath. More telling still is the field fence that cuts across the monument on an east-south-east to west-south-west line. Rather than simply crossing the old earthwork, the fence actually incorporates the inner bank as part of its structure, and where this happens the bank has been steepened and faced with dry stone walling. Someone found a ready-made boundary and improved it for their own purposes, reshaping an early medieval feature into a functional farm division. The outer bank survives best on the northern and southern sides, where it has not been pressed into this secondary service, and from the northern slope the surrounding countryside opens out in the way it presumably did for whoever first chose this elevated position.