From its raised position, it once looked out over Derrymore Lough, though the lough itself has been largely undone by modern drainage and is now little more than an expanse of wet ground. Out in the middle of that sodden hollow, there is thought to be a crannog, an artificial or semi-artificial island used as a dwelling place in early medieval Ireland. The pairing of a rath on the ridge and a possible crannog in the wetland below is the kind of detail that suggests a community making deliberate use of terrain, watching both the high ground and the water.

The rath itself is a roughly circular raised area, measuring about 31.5 metres northeast to southwest and 33 metres northwest to southeast. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from roughly 500 to 1000 AD, defined by one or more earthen banks and used as a domestic and agricultural settlement. Here the bank survives in varying states: reasonably intact along the south-southwest to north-northeast arc, reduced to a scarp of about 1.5 metres on the northeast, and worn nearly flat on the southeast. Stones protruding from the inner lip of the bank may be the remnants of an original stone facing, and further large stones emerge at random from the outer face on the west side. There is no clearly defined entrance, though the east is considered the most likely location for one. A modern field fence cuts across the interior on a northeast to southwest line, and the western portion, sitting to one side of this division, is the better preserved half.

The interior is largely level, with a slight dip near the northern bank, and the perimeter is marked by scattered hawthorn bushes, a few of which have also taken hold along the bisecting fence. A small depression a few metres to the west of the rath is probably an old quarry pit, the kind of modest extraction hollow that appears near many earthworks where stone or material was needed close at hand.