A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, roughly dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries, built by farming families who banked up earth into a roughly circular wall to define their homestead and protect their livestock. This particular example measures about 24.6 metres in internal diameter, enclosed by what is described as a substantial earthen bank, and a gap on the eastern side most likely marks where the original entrance once stood.

For much of its more recent existence, the site was swallowed up inside a dense forestry plantation, visible on successive Ordnance Survey editions as a shape buried among trees. That plantation has since been cleared, which means the earthwork is now exposed again to open air and daylight after a long period of obscurity. The clearing away of commercial forestry from around archaeological monuments is not uncommon in Ireland, where such plantations were often established in the mid-twentieth century without close attention to what lay beneath the canopy. The removal of the trees here has returned the rath to something closer to the kind of open agricultural setting it would originally have occupied.