This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, built by farming families who defined their territory and protected their livestock with a circuit of earthen banks and ditches. Most were never military fortifications in any serious sense; they were households, and the enclosure was as much a statement of social standing as a practical barrier.

This particular example is a double-banked rath, meaning it has two concentric earthen banks separated by a fosse, which is simply a ditch dug to provide material for the banks and to deepen the obstacle between them. The inner bank survives to an internal height of around 0.9 metres on the south, west, and north sides, while the eastern boundary is formed instead by a natural or cut scarp. The outer bank, reaching roughly 0.55 metres, survives from the west-south-west around to the north-north-west. There is a noticeable bulge on the inner face of the inner bank to the south-west, the purpose of which is not recorded, and gaps appear in both banks, one to the east-north-east in the inner bank and one to the west-south-west in the outer, likely the original entrance or a later breach. The overall oval measures approximately 63 metres east to west and just under 55 metres north to south, making it a reasonably substantial enclosure by Irish standards. What adds a further layer of interest is the presence of cultivation ridges running across the interior on an east-west axis, suggesting that at some point after the rath fell out of use as a settlement, someone ploughed the ground inside it, layering agricultural history directly on top of the earlier one.