In 1981, gravel quarrying at the centre of the site broke into a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage or refuge, and inside it were two ogham stones. Ogham is an early medieval script rendered as notched lines along a stone's edge, most commonly found in Munster, and its presence here suggests the site carries layers of significance that the landscape above ground no longer communicates.

The ringfort itself, a rath, meaning an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, had already been badly damaged by the time archaeologists arrived. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1904, and 1936 all show the roughly circular enclosure, around 30 metres in diameter, sitting on the edge of a steep natural slope above the flat marshy ground bordering the Tanyard stream. That slope on the northern side likely served as a natural defence, supplementing the constructed bank and fosse. The fosse, the outer ditch, was originally 3 metres wide and 2 metres deep. A 5-metre-wide causewayed entrance lay to the south-east. Then, in the 1960s, bulldozers cleared most of it. Excavations led by B. Ó Donnabháin between 1982 and 1984 recovered what remained: a surviving stretch of bank about 10 metres long on the eastern side, a stone kerb on the internal face, and the foundations of a small circular structure roughly 4 metres across at the interior. The ground had also been disturbed by earlier lazy-bed cultivation, the ridged planting system associated with potato farming. Among the finds were a yellow glass bead with a herring-bone design, a rotary hone stone used for sharpening blades, a William and Mary penny dating to the late seventeenth century, and an urn burial uncovered during the 1984 season. That range of objects, spanning potentially over a millennium, points to a site that was returned to, reused, and quietly inhabited across many different periods.