It is, in fact, a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish landscape. Thousands were built across the country, mostly during the early medieval period, serving as enclosed farmsteads for single families or small communities. This one is modest but measurable: a circular area of roughly 22 metres in diameter, defined by a bank that still stands nearly a metre high on its outer face.

The earthwork follows a pattern well established in ringfort construction. A bank, here about 1.4 metres wide, encircles the interior, and beyond it lies an external fosse, essentially a surrounding ditch, some 5.5 metres across. The fosse would originally have been dug to provide the material for throwing up the bank, and together they created a boundary that was as much a social marker as a defensive one. On the north-west to north-east arc, the bank has been reduced to a scarp, a slope rather than a raised feature, suggesting centuries of weathering, agricultural activity, or both. The entrance, two metres wide, faces south, which is a reasonably common orientation for ringforts, possibly for practical reasons related to sunlight and prevailing weather, though no single explanation has settled the question definitively.