The hedge marks the outer edge of an early medieval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in Ireland roughly between 500 and 1000 AD, and the fact that a field boundary still traces its arc a thousand or more years later says something about how persistently these earthworks shape the landscape long after their original purpose has been forgotten.

The monument sits on a very slight rise in pasture, barely perceptible to the eye but typical of the modest high ground that early ringfort builders tended to favour. When surveyors examined it in 1983, they recorded a semi-circular enclosure measuring approximately 46 metres east to west and 44 metres north to south, defined by the traces of an inner bank, a possible intervening fosse (a defensive ditch), and a possible outer bank. The inner bank survives as very faint traces at the north and north-west. A shallow ditch runs from the south-west around through west, north, east, and south-east, and may be the fosse that once separated the inner and outer banks. That outer bank has been largely absorbed into the existing field fence, which now supports the mature thorn hedge visible from the air as a curvilinear tree-lined boundary. A low, wide scarp defines the monument along its south-east to south-west arc. The interior is level and, at ground level at least, featureless. The 1913 revised edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map already recorded the site simply as a curvilinear field boundary, suggesting that even by that point its original character had been quietly domesticated into the working farm landscape around it.