Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Most were farmsteads rather than military strongholds, their encircling banks and ditches serving as much to contain livestock and signal status as to provide defence. The Barleyhill example is unusually well-preserved, and what makes it worth a second look is the precision of its construction and the way the builders worked with the natural landscape rather than against it.

The rath takes the form of a raised circular platform, roughly 29 by 32 metres across, ringed by a substantial scarp, a steep-sided earthen slope, that reaches nearly three metres in height at the north-east. Beyond the scarp lies a fosse, an encircling ditch, some four metres wide at the south-west, and beyond that again a substantial outer bank, standing over two metres high on its exterior face. At the north-east, where the natural hillside drops away, the builders adapted their approach: there the fosse becomes a terrace cut directly into the slope, and the outer bank reduces to a simple scarp, letting the topography do the work. The original entrance is still legible at the east-south-east, where a gap in the scarp, over four metres wide and flanked by stones protruding from the terminals on either side, opens onto a low causeway across the fosse and a narrower corresponding gap in the outer bank. Inside the enclosure, slightly to the north-east of centre, there is a low, gently domed grass-covered rise, around six to six and a half metres in diameter. Its purpose is not known. It could represent the remains of a structure, a storage pit, or something else entirely; the ground simply does not say.

The interior today is open pasture with patches of scrub and bramble, and the enclosing earthworks are lined with beech trees, with hawthorn and ash along the western arc of the scarp. The Gweestion River runs through the valley floor around two hundred metres to the north, and from the platform the views across the low-lying fields in every direction give a clear sense of why this particular rise was chosen. Whatever happened here, whoever enclosed this ground and crossed that causeway entrance, they chose their spot with care.