What gives it away, if anything does, is the slight rise of an earthen bank and the dense overgrowth that has claimed the interior, creating a conspicuous tangle of vegetation sitting incongruously in otherwise open farmland. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Thousands were built across the country, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries, as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of moderate status. Banks, ditches, and scarped edges provided both a degree of physical security and a clear statement of territorial occupation.

The Cappananty example measures approximately 41 metres east to west, placing it within the typical size range for a single-family enclosure. The earthen bank survives along the south-west to east arc, rising roughly half a metre on the interior face and one and a half metres on the exterior, with an accompanying fosse, or ditch, running outside it. That fosse is recorded at around 0.7 metres deep and 1.1 metres wide, modest dimensions but still legible in the ground. Elsewhere, the enclosure is defined by a slight scarped edge rather than a full bank, suggesting either differential survival or an originally uneven construction. A gap of about 2.4 metres in the north-west section of the bank almost certainly represents the original entrance. A field boundary running north to south abuts the western side of the enclosure, a reminder of how later agricultural organisation has grown up around, and sometimes over, features like this. The site was compiled by Denis Power and an aerial photograph taken on 5 October 2002 is held in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland archive.

The site sits in working farmland, so access would require the landowner's permission. The interior and the enclosing bank are described as covered in dense overgrowth, which means the earthworks are easier to read from a distance or from above than from within. The entrance gap at the north-west is probably the clearest single feature to look for on the ground. An aerial photograph can be more revealing than a ground-level visit for a site like this, and the ASI archive image referenced in the survey notes gives a useful overhead perspective on how the circular form sits within its field system.