The original entrance is no longer recognisable, the surrounding ditch or fosse that would typically define a rath has vanished entirely from the ground surface, and two shallow hollows scooped into its interior suggest someone, at some point, decided the enclosed earth was more useful as fill or building material than as archaeology. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, usually circular or oval, defined by one or more earthen banks with an external ditch; thousands survive across Ireland in varying degrees of completeness. This one, on a gentle slope facing east-north-east and set within pasture, survives in a reduced but legible form.

The enclosing bank runs around an oval interior measuring roughly 26 metres on its longest axis and 19 metres across, with the bank itself about 4.2 metres wide and only 0.4 metres high on the interior face, suggesting considerable settling or robbing over time. What does survive in good condition is the tree cover: mature ash trees grow at regular intervals along the top of the bank on all sides, a detail that gives the site an unexpectedly ordered appearance, as though the planting were deliberate. It may well have been. In Irish rural tradition, trees on a rath were often left standing out of caution, the sites being associated in folklore with the otherworld, and landowners sometimes planted or maintained them as boundary markers. The two quarried hollows inside, one against the western bank and one near the south-east, are shallow enough to suggest opportunistic rather than systematic extraction, but they are a reminder that these sites were frequently treated as convenient sources of loose earth long before their archaeological significance was widely appreciated. The placename Fortland carries its own quiet record of the feature, the word fort being a common anglicisation of rath in Irish townland nomenclature.