A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular or subcircular, defined by earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or settlement. This one, known as Cahergal, sits near the top of a steep south-south-east-facing slope, with the green valley towards Applevale spread out below it. What makes it unusual is not what survives but what so nearly did not: the banks are low, the centre is overtaken by nettles and thistles, and cattle have worn multiple gaps through whatever definition the earthworks once held.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the site twice in the early twentieth century and left a compressed record of its decline. Writing in 1905, he described it as levelled almost to the field. By 1913 he had revised that slightly, calling it a barely visible ring of filling. That phrase, almost rueful in its precision, still captures what is there today. The earthworks that remain measure roughly 22 metres north to south and just under 20 metres east to west, with a scarp about a metre high along the southern and western edges and a rounded bank to the north that rises only a fraction above the surrounding ground. Along the eastern perimeter there is a further low bank, possibly not original at all but the remnant of a land commission field boundary, a product of the twentieth-century reorganisation of agricultural holdings rather than of early medieval settlement. The site was recorded as a cashel on the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places, cashel being the term used in parts of Munster for a stone-walled enclosure, though the surviving remains here are earthen rather than stone. It appeared on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, hachured and named, which suggests it was still legible enough to map even as Westropp was noting its near-disappearance.