The grove is fenced off from the surrounding farmland, which has had the unintended effect of protecting what lies within: a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of these survive across Ireland, but each one rewards a closer look, because the details encoded in the earthworks tell you something about how seriously whoever lived there took their own security.

This particular example measures forty-one metres across its northeast to southwest axis, enclosed by a stony earthen bank that stands 2.2 metres high on its outer face, though only half a metre above the interior floor, which tells you the bank was built up from soil dug out of the fosse, the defensive ditch that rings most of the exterior. That fosse runs between 3.3 and 4.5 metres wide and drops to just over a metre at its deepest points. It can be traced for most of the circuit, though it disappears at the north. Collapsed remnants of a field boundary wall survive at the outer lip of the fosse on the eastern and western sides, suggesting the landscape around the rath was actively managed agricultural land for some time after the enclosure itself was built or abandoned. A gap in the bank on the southeast, about 3.5 metres wide, is thought to represent the original entrance. Inside, a low scarp east of centre marks a slight change in ground level, and in the western half of the interior there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind often used for storage or, in times of trouble, concealment.