A rath is an enclosed farmstead, typically from the period between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, defined by earthen banks and ditches rather than stone walls, and built to shelter a family and their livestock rather than to serve any serious military purpose. This one sits on a natural shelf of ground on the south-east-facing slope, with a north-to-south stream running about a hundred metres to the east, a useful proximity to fresh water that would have mattered enormously to whoever chose this site.

The enclosure measures roughly 21 metres east to west and 19 metres north to south, and its defences, modest but legible, follow a consistent pattern around the perimeter. Along the northern arc, an earthen bank survives to an internal height of around 35 centimetres and an external height of 60 centimetres, and its width reaches about 3.4 metres. Elsewhere around the circuit, the bank gives way to a simple scarp, a cut slope in the ground surface, rising between 80 centimetres and 1.2 metres. Outside the bank, a fosse, meaning a defensive ditch, runs from the south-west around to the north-east; it is between 2.5 and 3 metres wide at the top but only 10 to 20 centimetres deep today, much of it reduced further to a low berm, a narrow flat shelf of earth, marked by little more than a faint change in ground level. The entrance, at 3.7 metres wide, faces roughly south-south-west, a common enough orientation for ringforts, possibly for reasons of shelter or solar aspect, though no single explanation has ever settled the question.