Most visitors to Irish ringforts encounter a well-defined circular enclosure, its earthen banks still readable as the boundary of an early medieval farmstead. Here, the outline has largely dissolved back into the pasture, leaving something that requires a closer kind of attention to understand.

The site is a subcircular rath, a form of ringfort defined by earthen banks and a fosse, the term for the ditch dug between those banks, which would originally have enclosed a domestic settlement dating broadly to the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. This particular example measures approximately 34 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. It once comprised two banks with an intervening fosse, a fairly substantial arrangement suggesting a degree of status or defensive concern on the part of whoever built it. The inner bank is still legible at the northern and southern arcs, but elsewhere the enclosure is now marked only by a scarp, a natural-looking slope in the ground that is in fact the degraded ghost of a former earthwork. The fosse survives in a continuous line from the south around through the west to the north, but the outer bank has almost entirely gone, remaining visible only at the north-north-east. What you are left with is a partial signature of a structure that was once complete and coherent, now embedded in ordinary farmland.