That kind of interruption is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where centuries of agricultural reorganisation have left their mark on older features, but it does give the site an oddly bisected quality, a single circular intention split by a later straight line.

The earthwork is a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as a defended farmstead for a single family or small household. This one takes the form of a raised circular area with an internal diameter of approximately thirty metres, enclosed by a substantial bank of earth and stone. A break in that bank on the east-north-east side is thought to represent the original entrance, the point where people and animals would have passed in and out of the enclosed yard. Raths were not military fortifications in any grand sense; the bank and, originally, whatever fence or hedge topped it, served more to define territory, contain livestock, and signal social standing than to repel serious attack. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, though many have been levelled by ploughing over the past two centuries.