But the slight bank curving from east to north, measuring roughly 22 metres across at its widest, marks the surviving edge of a rath, an early medieval earthwork enclosure of the kind once found in their thousands across Ireland. Most raths functioned as enclosed farmsteads, a bank and sometimes a ditch defining the space around a family's dwelling and outbuildings, as much a statement of social standing as a line of defence.

This particular example was already being recorded on Ordnance Survey maps by 1840, its outline traced in the characteristic hachured markings that cartographers used to indicate earthworks, and it appeared again on the 1916 revision of the six-inch series. The bank itself is modest now, standing no more than 35 centimetres above the surrounding ground on its outer face and somewhat less on the interior, with a width of around two metres. Two narrow gaps, each less than a metre wide, have been cut through the southern and south-western sections of the bank, likely at some point when the land was in regular agricultural use. A field boundary now crosses the northern portion of the monument on a broadly east-west alignment, a later imposition that says something about how quietly these sites have been absorbed into working farmland over the centuries. The interior is flat and tilts gently downward toward the east, with the ridge location giving the site open views across the surrounding landscape.