At Bunnafedia, the ground lifts only slightly, and there is no dramatic earthen bank to catch the eye, yet the shape underfoot is deliberate and ancient. This is a rath, a type of ringfort that once served as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, typically defined by a raised interior platform, a surrounding bank, and a ditch. Here, the bank is gone, but the platform survives, a circular area roughly 23 metres across, its edge marked by a broad scarp that still rises to about one and a half metres.

What gives the site its particular interest is the quiet archaeology of what remains and what does not. The external fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have encircled the raised interior, has been filled in, but its outline can still be read in the ground across the northern, eastern, and southern arc of the site, running between one and a half to two metres wide. A causeway, two metres across, crosses the fosse at the east-south-east, and this almost certainly marks where the original entrance once stood. Causeways of this kind are a fairly consistent feature of ringfort design, left deliberately uncut to allow access across the ditch. The south-western to north-north-western section of the perimeter tells a different story: a laneway has cut through this portion and taken part of the interior with it, leaving the site incomplete on that side.