The circular rath here measures 34 metres in diameter and is defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, cut between them. That double-bank arrangement is worth pausing over: most ringforts across Ireland are defined by a single bank and ditch, so a site with two banks indicates something more substantial, possibly the enclosed settlement of a family of higher social standing in early medieval Ireland. A ringfort, broadly speaking, was a circular enclosure of earth or stone used as a defended farmstead, most commonly built and occupied between roughly 500 and 1000 AD.

The landscape here was once part of the Clonbrock estate, a property associated with the Dillon family, who held it as an aristocratic demesne well into the twentieth century. The estate's organised parkland and level fields, which make the earthwork so visible today, are themselves a relatively recent imposition on a terrain that had already been shaped and reshaped over centuries before any demesne wall was drawn. That the rath survived at all within a managed estate landscape is somewhat fortunate; such earthworks were frequently levelled for agricultural improvement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Adding to the interest of the immediate area, a second ringfort lies approximately 250 metres to the south-east, suggesting this part of north Galway supported a cluster of early medieval settlement activity rather than any isolated household.