From this slight elevation the ground opens northward across the river valley in a way that would not have been lost on whoever chose this spot, probably somewhere in the first millennium AD, to build what is known as a rath, a ringfort built from earth rather than stone, and almost certainly used as a defended farmstead.

The site is circular, measuring roughly 41 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, and its structure reveals a more elaborate arrangement than a casual glance at the grass would suggest. The innermost enclosure is defined by a low internal bank, only about 0.2 metres high in places, though a more substantial earthen bank survives along the eastern to south-southwestern arc, rising to around 1.8 metres on its outer face. Between these two banks lies a fosse, a defensive ditch, about a metre deep, with a second, shallower fosse running outside the outer bank. A further narrow bank, roughly 0.8 metres high and enclosing the whole arrangement in parts, appears to be the remnant of a later field boundary rather than part of the original defensive scheme. The interior is slightly raised and tilts gently downward toward the east. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1936 all show the enclosure as a hachured circle, meaning cartographers across nearly a century each judged it worth recording.

The survival of the double-bank and double-fosse system along the eastern and south-southwestern arc is what makes this particular rath worth attention. Multivallate ringforts, those with more than one surrounding bank and ditch, are generally associated with higher-status occupants in early medieval Ireland, and while the western and northern sections have been reduced to a scarp, enough of the earthworks remain to read the original intention of the design clearly on the ground.