Most ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, were built for agricultural life and local status rather than warfare. This one, modest in diameter at just under thirty metres, was pressed into service across two quite separate campaigns separated by decades, long after any original domestic purpose it may have served had been forgotten.

The earthwork sits on a natural hill, which would have made it a practical elevated position for anyone needing to watch or control the surrounding ground. Its bank survives to a height of over one and a half metres on the exterior to the north, with a scarp of comparable height to the south, though there is no surviving trace of a fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanied such banks, nor of any original entrance feature. During the Cromwellian wars of the 1650s the site was refortified, presumably because the existing earthen enclosure offered a ready-made defensive outline that required less labour than building from scratch. Then, in 1691, the Williamite army made use of it again as a base camp in their operations against Sligo, a detail recorded by the nineteenth-century antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin. That two armies, representing very different moments in the long convulsion of seventeenth-century Irish history, both found this small prehistoric mound worth occupying says something about the durability of good ground.