A rath, as these earthen enclosures are known in Irish, was typically a roughly circular bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead during the early medieval period, and this one measured around 40 metres across at its widest. What makes it quietly strange is not what survives but what does not: by the time anyone looked closely, the enclosure had been almost entirely consumed by the working landscape around it.

The site appears clearly enough on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, drawn as a roughly circular enclosure. At some point after that survey, two field boundaries were laid across it, both running roughly northwest to southeast, one overlying the enclosing element from the north around to the east, the other continuing from the east down to the south. When the site was inspected in June 1983, those field boundaries, now planted with trees following the original curving line of the rath, were the only above-ground evidence remaining from north around through east to south. The southern and western arc had left no visible trace at all. The interior, for its part, had become a tangle of trees. The ancient boundary, in other words, had been replaced almost seamlessly by a later one, the rath's curve preserved in the landscape but stripped of its original meaning.