Where the ground falls away to the south-east, the bank was raised higher to maintain a level interior; where the hill rises to the north-west, the builders cut directly into the slope instead. The result is an enclosure that reads differently depending on where you stand around it, its external bank reaching up to 3.3 metres on one side while dropping to a low internal scarp on others.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Raths were typically earthen-banked enclosures built to define and defend a farmstead, most dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. The one at Caherdowney measures approximately 32 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, making it a fairly typical example in terms of scale. The interior and the bank itself have since been planted with coniferous trees, which both preserves the earthwork from ploughing and obscures the original open quality of the space. The surrounding field fences have been levelled, leaving the monument somewhat isolated within the pasture around it, its boundaries now read through the earthwork alone rather than through any surviving landscape framework.