It is easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at, which is part of what makes it worth a second glance. The bank that once defined its perimeter is now densely overgrown and barely a swell in the ground, but the roughly thirty-metre diameter of the enclosure is still readable if you look carefully. A gap of around three and a half metres on the south-south-west side may be the original entrance, though the centuries have done enough damage that this cannot be stated with certainty.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, built and occupied broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, with the bank here now so reduced and smothered in vegetation that the site registers as poorly preserved. What survives is enough to confirm the form, but the finer details, the original height of the bank, the nature of any internal structures, are long gone. The prominent position on a rise is characteristic; such elevated spots offered practical advantages in terms of drainage and visibility, and this one in Carheenlea would have looked out over the surrounding low ground in much the same way it does today.