It is, in fact, a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and this one at Coolygorman is among the more modest examples, worn down by time and cattle rather than quarried away for building stone.

The site, recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, takes the form of a circular enclosure approximately twenty-four metres in diameter. It is defined by an earthen bank that stands about forty centimetres high on the interior and rises to seventy-five centimetres on the outer face, with an external fosse, a shallow surrounding ditch, running around it at roughly twenty centimetres deep and a metre wide. The difference in height between the inner and outer faces of the bank is typical of how these features were constructed, with the excavated material from the fosse being thrown inward to build up the enclosing rampart. The bank has been gapped in several places, most likely the result of cattle moving through the enclosure over a long period, and the interior is now covered in dense overgrowth, which at once signals that something is there and makes it difficult to examine closely.

Accessing a site like this in active farmland requires a degree of courtesy and common sense. The land is in private ownership, and approaching the landowner beforehand is both the practical and the courteous course. The fosse and bank are most legible in low winter light, when the shadows thrown across level ground make subtle earthworks far easier to read than they would be in summer. The overgrown interior is worth circling rather than entering, since the perimeter bank is the main visible feature, and the relationship between bank and fosse becomes clearer when you can see both together from the outside. There is nothing dramatic to announce the place; the discipline is in learning to see what the landscape is quietly holding.