What looks at first like a simple raised circle turns out to be a carefully engineered enclosure, its earthen bank still standing some 2.6 metres high, fronted by an external fosse, a defensive ditch roughly 2 metres deep, and a counterscarp bank beyond that. A narrow causeway, just 3 metres wide, crosses the fosse to the south-southeast, the only formal break in the bank and presumably the original entrance. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built from earth rather than stone, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Most were home to a single family and their livestock, the enclosing banks serving as much to keep animals in as to keep strangers out.

What makes this particular example worth pausing over is the internal detail that survives. A scarp running roughly northwest to southeast cuts off a section of the interior to the northeast, suggesting the enclosed space was subdivided at some point, perhaps to separate animals from the main domestic area. Cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis cross the interior, traces of the small-scale tillage that would have fed whoever lived here. Most intriguing of all is the souterrain at the centre. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, hand-built and deliberately concealed, used in early medieval Ireland for cold storage or, in times of trouble, as a place of refuge. Their construction required considerable effort, which says something about how much whoever lived here valued having one. Together, the subdivided interior, the old ridge-and-furrow cultivation marks, and the underground passage paint a more inhabited picture than the grassy mound alone might imply.