No earthwork, no ditch, no raised platform. Yet the ground once held a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. These structures were built predominantly during the early medieval period and served as farmsteads or settlements for families of some local standing. This particular example was univallate, meaning it had a single surrounding bank rather than the double or triple rings seen at more elaborate sites.

The rath's existence is known largely because it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps produced between 1841 and 1842, when surveyors travelling the Irish countryside documented features that were already beginning to disappear. By the time C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey was published in 1995, the site had left no visible surface trace. What the nineteenth-century mapmakers caught, in other words, was either the last impression of the earthwork or a local memory of it that the surveyors thought worth marking. The northwest corner of a pastoral field is where it is recorded as lying, and that corner of that field is now, to the eye, simply a field.