What looks like a natural rise in the ground is actually a substantially engineered earthwork, roughly 28 metres across east to west and just over 30 metres north to south, with an outer scarp that still stands up to 2.5 metres high on its western side. A rath, to use the Irish term, is a type of ringfort, an enclosed farmstead of early medieval date typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a defended homestead for a farming family. This one occupies a deliberate position on a gentle rise, with open views westward along a stream valley, though higher ground to the south-east looks down over it.

The earthwork shows signs of having been altered at various points since it was first built. On the southern arc of the scarp, someone cut the bank back to a near-vertical face and added stone facing, changes that belong to a more recent period rather than the original construction. A broad, flat terrace running between the main scarp and what may be an outer bank could represent the original fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanied such enclosures, though the picture is complicated by the fact that this area was later absorbed into a trackway recorded on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1838 and 1930. A gradual, ramp-like slope on the south-eastern side of the scarp, about two metres wide, is a plausible candidate for the original entrance. The interior is ringed with hawthorn and hazel, and a large hollow in the southern half, now thick with blackthorn and brambles, appears to be the result of quarrying at some point. A second rath lies roughly 320 metres to the north-west, suggesting this was once a more densely occupied corner of the landscape than it might appear today.