A rath is an earthen ringfort, typically a circular bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead, built and occupied throughout the early medieval period in Ireland. This one sits on elevated ground above a small river some thirty metres to the west, with only a narrow ledge of level ground separating the earthwork from a steep drop to the riverbank. The national road, the N5, runs immediately to the south. It is the kind of place that reads, at first glance, as unremarkable pasture.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a roughly circular enclosure somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres in diameter, with what appeared to be an arc of fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanied such a bank, along with an outer bank at the north-east. By the 1920 edition the same feature was being mapped as D-shaped, with its straight side running along the south to south-west. Whether that change reflects actual deterioration between surveys, different interpretive conventions among the cartographers, or both, is difficult to say. What is certain is that the early twentieth century dealt the site a serious blow: quarrying removed the greater part of the earthwork, leaving only a semi-circular arc of bank running from north-west to south-east, with a thin strip of the original interior surviving just inside the bank to the north. Immediately to the north-west there is a large grassed-over depression, fifteen to twenty metres across, with a heap of stones sitting in its base, most likely the scar of another quarrying episode. The rath does not stand alone in the landscape, either. Two further ringforts lie close by, one roughly a hundred and twenty metres to the south-east, another about two hundred metres to the east, suggesting this was once a stretch of countryside with a meaningful concentration of early settlement activity.