Two roads converge at an angle in Ballynaraha, and the old fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the outside of the earthwork, has been quietly absorbed into the local road network, linking both routes as a working thoroughfare. It is a peculiar kind of survival, where the feature that endures does so not because it was protected but because it became useful.

A rath is a type of ringfort built from earth rather than stone, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and associated with farmsteads and enclosed settlement. This one is a substantial example, with a circular interior about 42 metres across, defined by an earthen bank that still stands around 2.6 metres high on its inner face in the sections that remain intact. The entrance faces south-southeast, a common enough orientation for sites of this kind. What complicates the picture here is the damage recorded in August 1985, when the bank was levelled along a stretch running from the south-east to the south-west. Elsewhere, the inner face of the bank was cut back and the material pushed outward rather than removed entirely, which has altered the profile without entirely erasing it. The roads skirt the site to the east and west, which is probably why the rath survived at all in a landscape where countless similar earthworks were simply ploughed flat.