The ground sloped away beneath them, and rather than abandon the site, they engineered around it, deliberately raising the interior on the eastern side to create a level living surface within the oval boundary. It is a small detail, but it says something about the effort involved in establishing even a modest farmstead in early medieval Ireland.

The structure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement built predominantly between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries and found in enormous numbers across the Irish countryside. This particular example sits on a north-east-facing slope in pasture, and its enclosing boundary combines two construction techniques. From the south-east round to the north-north-east, an earthen bank survives to a height of about 1.3 metres and is faced with stone in places. From the north-north-east back round to the south-east, the enclosure is defined instead by a natural or cut scarp, a steep earthen face, reaching 1.6 metres. The overall shape is oval rather than truly circular, measuring approximately 23 metres north to south and just over 16 metres east to west. A narrow gap of roughly half a metre in the western bank likely marks the original entrance. Ringforts of this scale would typically have housed a single farming family and their livestock, the bank and scarp serving as much as a boundary marker and statement of land ownership as a defensive structure.