The ringfort itself is a fairly typical early medieval enclosure, roughly circular and about thirty-five metres across, defined by an earthen bank that still stands close to two metres high along its southern arc before flattening into a barely perceptible rise towards the north. What makes it worth pausing over is what lies beneath the interior: a souterrain, one of those narrow, stone-lined underground passages that were constructed, usually during the early medieval period, as places of refuge, storage, or concealment. They are found across Ireland in their hundreds, but their presence always suggests that the people who built and used a ringfort had thought carefully about what might go wrong.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most would have housed a single farming family and their animals, the enclosing bank offering a degree of protection and marking out a defined domestic territory. This one sits on a south-facing slope, a practical choice that would have made the most of available light and warmth. The external depression visible to the north-west is a remnant of the quarrying process by which the bank was raised, the soil dug out and piled inward. There are breaks in the low rise to the north-west and the east, which likely mark original entrance points, though the bank in those areas has been considerably reduced over time.