The oval earthwork, roughly 34 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, sits on a steep north-east-facing slope of a high ridge, and while the outer bank and its U-shaped fosse, the defensive ditch that would once have ringed the exterior, have largely eroded or been filled in over time, the interior is anything but empty. Scattered across the uneven ground are several low, grass-covered mounds, some of them encircled by faint fosse-like traces of their own. A writer in 1957 described the place as the Rath of Knockadoon, noting its "strange barrows atop of the rath" as though the word strange came naturally, and it still does.

A rath is a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead built in early medieval Ireland, typically by a single family of some local standing. This one carries the usual hallmarks: an earthen bank, a possible entrance gap of about 1.8 metres at the south-west, and the outline of a rectangular house visible in the north-east quadrant of the interior. But the interior holds features that complicate any straightforward reading. Towards the north-west is a large sub-rectangular depression measuring 8.4 metres by 5.2 metres, with mounded upcast material along its upper edges; whether this represents digging for materials, or something older such as a pit dwelling, has not been resolved. The low mounds scattered elsewhere across the site appear to be later additions, several of them overlying the original enclosing bank, which places them in a different phase of occupation entirely. The site has also been affected by quarrying, which has further unsettled the ground. A wayside cross, one of the standing roadside crosses that once marked routes and served as focal points for popular devotion, stands about 150 metres to the east, adding another layer to a landscape that has clearly been used and reused across centuries.