The earthwork is what remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a farmstead enclosed by one or more banks of earth and, typically, an outer ditch. Thousands were built across Ireland between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and this one near Dawstown held its shape clearly enough to be mapped three times over the course of a century.

Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded it in 1842, and again in 1904 and 1937, each time as a hachured circular enclosure of around sixty metres in diameter. The 1904 and 1937 editions even noted a gap in the bank to the south-east, most likely the original entrance. Somewhere around 1950, according to the landowner, the fort was levelled, the bank pushed down in the way that happened to countless similar sites during the mid-twentieth century when agricultural improvement took priority over earthworks that had stood for well over a thousand years. The levelling was not total. A low rise still traces a rough circle of about sixty-six metres across the pasture, slightly larger than the earlier map measurements suggest, and in the interior there is a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was often used for storage or refuge and frequently accompanied ringfort settlements in Cork and across Munster.