The low earthen banks here, no more than about sixty centimetres high and a couple of metres wide, are partially overgrown and incomplete, yet they appear to form the outlines of two rectangular structures aligned east to west. That orientation, combined with longstanding local tradition identifying the site as a church and burial ground, gives the earthwork a character quite different from the defensive enclosure its name suggests.

The word 'rath' usually refers to a ringfort, a circular raised enclosure of the early medieval period, and the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map does mark this site simply as 'Rath', showing concentric scarps running roughly north to south and north to east. But the internal structures, and the field name, complicate that tidy classification. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman recorded the site as a church location on land belonging to a Mr McCarthy, noting a circular area of roughly thirty-five yards in diameter, raised about two feet above the surrounding field, largely covered in grass mounds, with a fence already levelled by that point. The site has since moved, in a sense: the Owenbaun River was realigned at some stage, shifting the earthwork's relationship to its surroundings, and it now sits on the western bank of the new channel rather than its original position some 150 metres further east. The area is bounded to the north by a stone field boundary, to the east by a drainage canal, and to the south by a sunken farm trackway. By the time formal surveys were conducted, the site was being used as a dump for farmyard manure, which gives some indication of how little visible prestige it retained in the landscape.