The earthen bank that once defined this rath, a type of ringfort typically built as a defended farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, still traces a rough circle across a south-facing slope. It is low, only around 0.4 metres high along the surviving southern and western arc, and the interior it once enclosed has long since been given over to cultivation and buildings. The archaeology and the everyday have simply grown over one another.

The site measures approximately 29 metres in diameter on its north-south axis, which puts it within the typical range for a single-family rath of the early medieval period. These enclosures were once extraordinarily common across Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, and were built by farming families who raised a bank and, often, an outer ditch around their homestead as much for social display as for practical defence. At Pollnabunny, the western portion of the bank has been further obscured by a field fence built across it, and vegetation has taken hold over much of the remainder. The details above were recorded by D. Lavelle as part of an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, including the Lough Mask and Lough Carra area, published in 1994. By that point, a house and associated farm buildings already occupied the interior.

What makes this particular site quietly interesting is precisely its ordinariness. There is no dramatic visibility, no preservation order keeping the modern world at arm's length. Instead, a family's land in the twenty-first century sits more or less exactly where another family's enclosed farmstead sat over a thousand years ago, the old bank reduced to a low ripple in the pasture, still legible if you know to look for it.