Roughly twenty-five metres across and heavily overgrown, it is the kind of feature that a casual walker might take for a natural rise in the ground, a trick of the field, rather than a structure with a human history stretching back well over a thousand years.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, used by a single family or small community as a defended homestead. The enclosing bank here stands about 1.3 metres high and is reinforced on its northern side with stone facing, suggesting the builder paid particular attention to that exposed aspect. A possible fosse, the external ditch that would have accompanied the bank as a further defensive or boundary feature, survives in shallow form on the same northern side, around two metres wide. Two gaps break the circuit of the bank, one to the east at about 1.4 metres wide and one to the northwest at roughly 1.5 metres, at least one of which is likely to represent the original entrance, though which one that might be is difficult to say with certainty. The combination of earthen bank and stone facing is a practical arrangement seen elsewhere in Cork, where good building stone was often close to hand even on sites that were primarily earthwork constructions.