Walk the improved pasture at Rathneaveen and you will find only a semi-circular earthwork visible above ground, a low scarp between 25 and 37 centimetres high and two to three metres wide, curving along a north-south straight side of roughly 23 metres. The eastern half of the monument has effectively vanished from the surface, likely erased by successive field boundaries that cut across the site over generations of agricultural improvement. What remains on the ground is, in a sense, only half a story.

The fuller picture emerged from the air. An aerial photograph taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland in April 1974 caught the site at a moment when soil conditions revealed what ground inspection could not, and a later Ordnance Survey ortho image confirmed it through a cropmark, the faint discolouration in growing vegetation caused by buried features affecting moisture and nutrients differently from the surrounding soil. Together, these images indicate a monument with an overall diameter of around 34 metres, a scale that the surviving scarp alone would never suggest. Enclosures of this kind are broadly understood as enclosed settlements or farmsteads, typically associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, though the dating of any individual example depends on excavation evidence that this site has not, to the available record, produced. Adding further interest to the immediate landscape, two other enclosures lie within roughly 60 metres to the east and west, suggesting this part of Rathneaveen was once a more densely settled or organised piece of ground than its current pasture appearance implies.