The site belongs to a category of place defined more by what cannot be seen than by what can, which gives it a particular kind of quiet intrigue.

The rath itself is a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a domestic settlement. Souterrains, the underground passages sometimes found within or adjacent to such enclosures, were constructed during the same period, roughly the early centuries of the first millennium AD. Built from stone or earth-cut tunnels, they are thought to have served as storage spaces or places of refuge. At Cloonahard, no such passage is visible at ground level, and what survives is essentially a piece of local knowledge, a community memory of something running beneath the mound, passed down without physical evidence to anchor it.