A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as a farmstead or place of domestic settlement. This one at Lombardstown measures 35.5 metres in diameter, and while the bank still stands, it no longer reads as a monument so much as a feature folded into the field system around it.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded the enclosure with hachuring, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork, and noted the tree planting within it and the lime kiln built against its eastern side. A lime kiln was a stone-built furnace used to burn limestone into quicklime for fertilising fields, and the fact that one was constructed directly against the ringfort's bank suggests that by the nineteenth century the structure was valued more for its convenience as a windbreak or building platform than as anything requiring protection. Later OS maps from 1905 and 1936 continued to mark the enclosure, though without the same detail, suggesting the trees and kiln had become less noteworthy or had simply disappeared from the surveyors' interest.

Today the earthen bank survives to an internal height of around 1.1 metres and an external height of 1.9 metres along the north-northwest to south arc, dropping to a low rise elsewhere. It has been incorporated into the surrounding field fence system, and a laneway runs along its northern edge. The overgrowth is heavy, which is common for sites like this in pastoral farmland, where hedgerows tend to colonise earthworks over generations, making the original form harder to read from ground level but also, in a practical sense, helping to preserve what remains beneath.