The site sits on a south-facing slope, and the builders responded to that gradient in a practical way: they cut the interior into the hill to the north while raising it on the south side, levelling the living space within. The result is a roughly circular enclosure, measuring about 29 metres east to west and 28.5 metres north to south, that would not be immediately legible as architecture at all without knowing what to look for.

This is a rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country, though many have been damaged by agriculture or built over entirely. This example retains a stone-faced earthen bank that still stands to an external height of around 0.9 metres on its western side, rising to an internal height of 1.7 metres where it meets the cut hillslope. Elsewhere around the perimeter, the ground drops away in a scarp reaching 2.5 metres, which would have made the enclosure considerably more imposing from outside than a simple measurement of bank height might suggest. A gap on the east-south-east side, roughly 4 metres wide, is a possible original entrance, though such identifications are always provisional without excavation.