This is a ring barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument in which a central platform, presumably covering a burial, is encircled by a ditch and then an outer earthen bank. The one at Rath sits on an east-west ridge in the rolling grassland of north Mayo, and on a clear day Nephin Mountain is visible to the north-west on the horizon, a positioning that feels, intentional or not, quietly deliberate.

The monument is compact but well-defined. The central platform measures roughly five metres north-south and six metres east-west, rising only about thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground. Around it runs a fosse, the encircling ditch, between three and three and a half metres wide, and beyond that an external bank of earth and stone roughly three metres wide. At the north and north-east, where the bank merges with the natural slope of the ridge, the outer face rises to over a metre, giving it considerably more presence on that side than elsewhere. A modern field wall cuts across the exterior of the bank at the west and north-west, a reminder that agricultural life has continued to reshape the landscape around these older features for centuries. Three hawthorn bushes have taken root on the bank itself; hawthorns have long been associated in Irish tradition with ancient and otherworldly sites, and their presence here, whether coincidental or the result of deliberate avoidance by generations of farmers, adds a particular quality to the place. Roughly a hundred metres to the north-west, on the same ridge, stands a rath, a circular enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, a completely different type of monument in function and date, yet sharing the same elevated ground. That two such distinct structures occupy the same ridge line suggests this was a place that drew human attention across a very long span of time.