The earthen bank enclosing this roughly circular space, measuring just over thirty-five metres across, has been worn down considerably on its eastern side, standing only about a metre high there, while the remainder survives as a scarp rising to nearly twice that. The difference in height is a small but telling detail, suggesting centuries of uneven weathering, agricultural disturbance, or both.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement found across Ireland, typically dating to somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. A rath consists of one or more earthen banks enclosing a roughly circular area, originally topped with a timber palisade and used as a farmstead for a family of some local standing. Outside the main bank there would usually have been a fosse, a defensive ditch, and at Laravoolta that feature still exists, though barely: it survives now as a slight depression running along the inside of a field fence on the northern side of the enclosure, absorbed into the working landscape rather than held apart from it. The original entrance is thought to be the five-metre-wide break in the bank to the east, a gap of deliberate width that distinguishes it from the rougher modern opening cut into the northwest side at some later point.

The survival of the fosse, even in such a reduced state, is worth noting. Many raths across Ireland have lost this feature entirely to centuries of ploughing or drainage work. Here it persists as a faint crease in the ground, caught between the enclosure and the field boundary that has gradually crept up against it.