It is, in fact, a ringfort, the remains of an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, when thousands of such enclosures were built across Ireland by farming families who marked their territory and protected their livestock with a bank of earth and an outer ditch, known as a fosse. This example, roughly 32 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, sits on a rise that would once have offered a clear view of the surrounding countryside.

By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, the enclosure was already being recorded as a relic rather than a living feature, annotated simply as "fort" on the Fair Plan map of that year, with a gravel pit noted outside the bank to the north-west. The revised Ordnance Survey edition of 1911 tells a quieter story of attrition: the eastern side had by then been partially levelled, and the earthwork reduced in places to little more than a scarp, a low slope where a proper bank once stood. What survives best runs from the south-west around through the west to the north-north-east, where the bank and fosse retain something of their original profile. A field fence cutting across the perimeter at the south-west adds another layer of agricultural pragmatism laid over an older one. Within 180 metres to the south-south-east lies a second ringfort, and 175 metres to the north-west stands Toberallen Church and its associated churchyard, suggesting this corner of Westmeath was a place of some settlement continuity across many centuries.