Most raths, the circular earthen enclosures built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards as farmstead boundaries and status symbols, aim at a complete ring, however battered by time. The one at Trippul in north Kerry has shed its western side entirely, leaving an arc rather than a circle, and within that arc sits something stranger still: a low raised platform occupying roughly a quarter of the interior, set just thirty centimetres above the ground around it.

The site is what archaeologists classify as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the doubled or tripled rings found at more elaborate examples. That bank survives to about eighty centimetres on its outer face, with a slight fosse, or ditch, still faintly legible on the eastern side, dropping some forty centimetres below the surrounding land and stretching about a metre and a half wide. The interior measures twenty-seven metres across on its north-south axis. Two gaps break the surviving bank, one in the north and one to the south-east, measuring four metres and three metres respectively. These could represent original entrances, later breaks, or both. The western section has been levelled completely, the kind of attrition that centuries of farming tend to produce. The raised circular platform inside, roughly seven by eight metres, is the detail that gives the site its particular character. Such interior features sometimes indicate the site of a building, a midden, or a ritual focus, though without excavation the platform at Trippul keeps its purpose to itself.