It is well-preserved in parts, measuring just over fifty-one metres in diameter, with a bank and an external fosse, the ditch that runs around the outside of such enclosures, still legible on the ground. But the survival is uneven: from the south-east, sweeping round through south to west, no surface trace of the enclosing elements remains at all, leaving the monument feeling slightly unfinished, like a sentence that stops mid-thought.

A rath is the commonest type of Irish ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads for families of middling social rank, and the landscape of Ireland still holds thousands of them in varying states of survival. The Killuney example was recorded as early as 1914, when Neary noted not only the main bank but also an outer bank standing about five feet high on the northern side, which he observed was already disappearing towards the south. That outer bank has since vanished entirely, leaving the site a little diminished from even that early description. Associated with the rath is what appears to be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that in early medieval Ireland was typically used for storage or as a place of refuge.