The trees are a relatively recent intrusion, a planting of conifers inside an earthen enclosure that was already ancient when the Normans arrived in Ireland. What you are looking at, if you can read the landscape, is a rath, the commonest type of early medieval settlement in the Irish countryside. These were the farmsteads of ordinary farming families, defined by a raised earthen bank and an outer ditch, and they occur in their thousands across the island, most of them dating broadly to the period between the sixth and twelfth centuries.

This particular example is a tidy, near-circular enclosure, measuring thirty-five metres east to west and thirty-four metres north to south. The bank that defines it still stands to a height of around half a metre on the interior and slightly higher, about nine-tenths of a metre, on the outer face. Beyond the bank, the external fosse, a shallow ditch, survives to a depth of roughly thirty centimetres. These are modest dimensions, but the proportions are consistent and the form is well preserved. The entrance, three and a half metres wide, faces to the north-east. That orientation is not uncommon among ringforts, and while no single explanation covers every case, north-easterly or easterly openings are regularly noted in the archaeological record across Ireland. The interior, enclosed for centuries by that earthen circuit, is now occupied by the conifer planting, which obscures the ground surface and makes any reading of internal features difficult from the outside.