This is a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, yet each one carries its own particular degree of obscurity, and this example sits near the far end of that scale.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, was typically the enclosed homestead of an early medieval farming family, built sometime between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosure consisted of an earthen bank, or rampart, thrown up from a dug ditch known as a fosse, with the whole arrangement functioning as much as a marker of status and territory as a serious defensive structure. The Drumlarney example has an interior diameter of just over fifty metres, which is a reasonable size, suggesting it was not a negligible settlement in its time. Today, however, the fosse is legible only between the west-northwest and north-northeast, having been almost completely infilled elsewhere, and the bank itself is broken at many points. The original entrance, which in better-preserved examples can often be identified by a causeway across the fosse or by a gap with flanking features, is here unreadable.