The enclosing earthen bank has been almost entirely levelled, standing no more than twenty centimetres at its highest points, and a trackway cut after 1837 runs straight through the interior from north-west to south-east, bisecting what was once a coherent circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across. That combination, an ancient boundary reduced nearly to nothing, crossed by a later agricultural route and then sliced again by a townland boundary fence and road, gives the site an almost palimpsest quality, with different centuries of land use overlapping in a small patch of grass.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as defended homesteads, the circular bank and any associated ditch marking the boundary between a family's domestic space and the wider landscape. This particular example sits on a slope looking out towards Lough Derravaragh, about eight hundred metres to the south-west, a long and narrow lake in the Westmeath drumlin belt with its own considerable depth of mythology and history. A second ringfort lies just two hundred and seventy-five metres to the north, suggesting that this part of the hillside was relatively well settled at some point during that long early medieval period. The southern and south-eastern arc of the bank appears to have extended beyond the present townland boundary with Streamstown, meaning that the modern administrative line cuts across the original structure, and the full extent of the enclosure on that side can no longer be traced within a single field.