It is roughly thirty-five metres across, enclosed by a single earthen bank about six metres wide, and that bank still stands over a metre above the interior floor and nearly three metres above the outer ditch. For a construction of earth rather than stone, that is a remarkable degree of survival.

The site is a rath, the term used for a ringfort built from earthworks rather than the stone-built variant known as a cashel. Raths of this kind were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. What distinguishes the Guhard example is the clarity of its surviving features. The fosse, a U-shaped ditch that wraps around from the north, through the west, and down to the south-east, is still clearly legible on the ground, measuring around 2.2 metres wide and dropping 1.2 metres below the level of the surrounding land. The eastern side of the enclosure has a four-metre gap, which would have served as the original entrance. These proportions and this orientation are consistent with typical rath construction, but the state of preservation here is better than many comparable sites that have been ploughed flat or swallowed by later field improvements. The site was documented as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by C. Toal.

The position on a natural rise, with open views across the surrounding countryside, was almost certainly deliberate. Whether the elevation offered practical advantages in terms of drainage and visibility, or carried a degree of social significance in the landscape, it places the enclosure in a long tradition of Irish settlement sites that chose elevated ground even when that ground was modest by any measure.