The feature is a rath, a type of ringfort typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries as a defended farmstead or family enclosure. Most people pass through this part of Sligo with no awareness that one is here at all.

The enclosure measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, defined by a bank of earth and stone that has worn down considerably over the centuries to a height of around 0.4 metres and a width of between 2.5 and 3 metres. Outside the bank runs a shallow fosse, which is the ditch from which material was originally dug to build the bank up. That fosse, now only about 0.4 metres deep and 3 metres wide, can still be traced along the south-east, south-west, and west to west-south-west sides of the monument. On the eastern side, a gap of roughly 3 metres in the bank is thought to mark the original entrance, the point through which residents and livestock would have passed in and out of the enclosure during its working life. The place-name Toberpatrick, combining the Irish word tobar, meaning a well, with the name Patrick, hints at a longer devotional history in this immediate area, though the ringfort itself is a domestic rather than a religious structure.