The site is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, thousands of which survive across Ireland as traces of early medieval farmsteads and defended homesteads. This one, at Kiltycooly, measures fifty-one metres in diameter, its raised interior defined by a steep earthen scarp that varies considerably in height depending on where you stand. On the southern side, where the ground is naturally higher, the external face of the scarp rises only about 1.7 metres; on the northern side, where the land falls away more sharply, it climbs to 3.3 metres. The builders were compensating for the natural slope of the hill, adjusting the scale of their labour to achieve a consistently imposing exterior regardless of the approach. The ditch, or fosse, which sits at the outer foot of the scarp and measures nearly eight metres wide and over a metre deep, follows the same logic: it was only dug along the northeastern to south-southeastern arc, where the slope alone was insufficient to deter or impress. Elsewhere, the natural fall of the ground did the work for them. The fosse is now almost entirely silted up along its northeastern and eastern reaches, centuries of gradual accumulation having filled what was once a significant obstacle. A three-metre-wide ramp through the scarp on the northeastern side may preserve the line of the original entrance. In the centre of the interior, three small heaps of stone, each roughly two metres across and about half a metre high, appear to be field clearance piles, added long after the rath's active life as farmers worked the enclosed ground and had to put the rocks somewhere.