What makes this particular example quietly arresting is the combination of its deliberate siting and its layered construction. It sits on a gentle rise with open views in every direction, and immediately to the south-south-east the ground gives way to swampy terrain, a detail that almost certainly mattered to whoever chose this spot.

A rath is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically a farmstead of some status, defined by one or more concentric earthen banks with accompanying ditches. The one at Cooksborough follows that pattern: an inner bank, a U-shaped fosse (the ditch between the banks), and an outer bank enclosing an oval area roughly 33 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, dimensions recorded on the revised Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1913, where it appears as a tree-lined earthwork. When the monument was described in detail in 1972, the inner bank still stood to an external height of 2.3 metres in its best-preserved arc, running from the north-east around through the east and south. Elsewhere it had worn to almost nothing. A wide gap on the south-east side, nearly ten metres across at the top, is thought to mark the original entrance. The U-shaped fosse and outer bank survive most clearly on the north and north-west. At the north-north-east, the outer bank has been modified at some point to serve as a modern field boundary, and loose stone has been piled against the eastern scarp, small signs of the way working farmland gradually reshapes whatever it inherits. The interior slopes gently down toward the north-north-west, and the whole enclosure remains visible from aerial photography as a circular, partially tree-lined earthwork in an otherwise open field.