The enclosing bank still holds its shape, rising roughly a metre on the interior side and over two metres on the exterior, which is a meaningful height for a structure that has been sitting in a field, largely unattended, for well over a thousand years. On the southern bank, a slurry pit now abuts the earthwork, and a concrete farmyard presses against the western side, giving the site a peculiar layered quality where early medieval construction and working agricultural infrastructure occupy the same few square metres.

This is a rath, the commonest monument type in the Irish landscape, a ringfort of earthen construction that would originally have enclosed a farmstead, most likely during the early medieval period. What makes the Rathclare example slightly more involved than a simple enclosed homestead is that it was originally bivallate, meaning it once had two concentric enclosing banks rather than one. Ordnance Survey maps from 1906 and 1937 both record it with this double circuit, though by the time those maps were made the outer bank to the northwest had already been absorbed into a laneway. The surviving raised area measures approximately 25 metres in diameter. Beneath the western half lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was typically used for storage and possibly as a refuge. These features are commonly associated with ringforts of the early medieval period and suggest the site was a functioning domestic settlement of some significance rather than a purely defensive enclosure.