This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument found across Ireland. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, their circular earthen banks defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock, probably in use between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. This one measures approximately 35 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, its perimeter marked by a low earthen bank that shows most clearly along its south-western, western, and north-eastern arcs.

The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1834, where it is marked simply as a "Fort", the standard notation surveyors used at the time for circular earthworks of this kind. By the 1907 edition it is rendered as a hachured feature, the cartographic convention used to indicate a raised or depressed earthwork, suggesting the bank was still legible to the eye more than seventy years after the first survey. The choice of location is characteristic: the end of a natural spur would have offered its original inhabitants both drainage and a degree of elevation, making the enclosure easier to defend and oversee. That the earthwork has survived at all, in any form, on farmed land in a county that has seen considerable agricultural change, is noteworthy in itself.