What once stood as a circular earthen enclosure, a rath, has been levelled by centuries of agricultural use, leaving only the faintest swell in the soil to suggest anything was ever there. A rath is a type of ringfort defined by an earthen bank and surrounding ditch, and they are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries and serving as enclosed farmsteads. This one measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size, and its hilltop position above Castletownroche to the west would once have given it a commanding view over the surrounding landscape.

The site was recorded on the 1935 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular raised area, visible enough at that point to be plotted. At some stage between that survey and more recent observation, the earthworks were levelled, most likely through repeated ploughing of the tillage field that now occupies the ground. The clearest evidence for what was once here comes not from the surface but from the air. An aerial photograph has revealed a faint cropmark tracing the line of the fosse, the enclosing ditch, as a circular shape in the field. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the crops above them to grow at a slightly different rate, making the outline of a long-vanished feature briefly legible from above in the right conditions of drought or growth.