What makes the spot quietly arresting is that combination of defensive logic and natural drama: whoever chose this position was working with the landscape rather than against it, placing their enclosure where the ground falls away sharply and the horizon opens wide across a panoramic sweep from south-west through west to north-west.

The monument is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common archaeological feature in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, their earthen banks and ditches marking out a domestic space as much as a defensive one. This example is a reasonably substantial one. A circular area of roughly thirty metres in diameter is bounded by an earth and stone bank that stands 1.35 metres high externally and measures four metres across. Beyond that bank lies a fosse, a defensive ditch, some 2.5 metres wide, and beyond that again an outer bank that rises to 1.5 metres on its inner face. That outer bank survives on most of its circuit, but along the south-west to west arc it has been levelled and the fosse behind it filled in, suggesting at some point the ground was cleared and reworked, perhaps when the field boundaries that now cut into the eastern and western quadrants were established. The double-bank and fosse arrangement gives the site a slightly more elaborate profile than the average single-banked rath, though its current state of overgrowth makes the full sequence difficult to read from ground level.

The density of the vegetation, hawthorn in particular, makes picking out the individual earthwork elements a matter of patience. The outer bank survives most legibly on the northern and eastern sides, where the field boundaries have not yet compromised it, and the fosse can be traced as a distinct depression before the growth closes over it again.