Neighbours have long called it a lios, the Irish term for a fairy fort or ringfort associated in folklore with otherworldly inhabitants, yet what actually lies here is almost certainly a ring barrow, a form of prehistoric burial monument quite distinct in function, if not always in appearance, from the enclosed farmsteads that scatter the Irish countryside.

A ring barrow typically marks a place of burial from the Bronze Age, its essential form being a low central platform surrounded by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, with the excavated material thrown outward to form a bank. This example follows that pattern closely. The central platform measures just under five metres across and sits within a fosse roughly three metres wide and less than half a metre deep, with an outer bank rising to about forty centimetres. These are modest dimensions, suggesting a site of quiet rather than monumental intention. The local name recorded by Hartnett in 1939 points to a long process by which the original meaning of the earthwork dissolved into the far more familiar world of Irish folk belief, the boundary between burial place and fairy ground being, in the popular imagination, not always a firm one.