What appears to the casual eye as an unremarkable division between fields is, in all likelihood, the surviving arc of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead and place of residence during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The site's paper trail tells a story of gradual erasure. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Monaghan in the 1830s, and revised that mapping in 1858, the enclosure was still legible enough to be recorded as a distinct circular form, approximately 28 metres across in a north-west to south-east direction. By the time the 1907 edition of the map was produced, that clear outline had softened into a curved field boundary, suggesting the earthworks had been reduced or absorbed into the working landscape of the farm. Faint traces of the original perimeter can still be detected in the pasture to the south-east and west, visible mainly as low undulations in the ground rather than any dramatic earthwork.