This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was built across Ireland in enormous numbers during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive in varying states of preservation, but this one has an additional layer of quiet strangeness: a later drystone field wall runs along its outer edge from north to south-south-east, closely following the curve of the enclosure as though acknowledging it, and the narrow gap between the two, about two metres wide, once served as a trackway or road.

That road is documented on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it can be seen continuing beyond the rath in both directions, to the north-west and to the south. Today those stretches are gone, absorbed back into the landscape, and only the section running beside the rath itself survives, held in place between the old earthwork and the field wall as though the two structures conspired to preserve it. The rath itself is roughly circular with a diameter of about twenty-five metres. Its most intact section is on the north-east arc, where a stony, gravelly bank still stands to an external height of around one metre and a width of three metres; elsewhere it has been reduced to a low stony rise. Hawthorn rings the perimeter, a detail that would not surprise anyone familiar with the Irish countryside, where hawthorn and ringforts have a long association, the trees often left untouched out of a deep-seated reluctance to disturb such places. To the east, bog stretches away across the undulating ground, with a stream running along its margin about a hundred metres off.