At its most pronounced, the eastern end of the bank stands just a quarter of a metre high. At its western end, it sinks to a mere five centimetres. It would be easy to walk past without noticing, and yet the measurements tell a coherent story: a linear bank, roughly 7.1 metres wide overall and 4.8 metres across its flattened top, extending for around 20 metres before becoming faint but still traceable for another 20 metres beyond that, where it finally dissolves into the landscape.

Alongside the bank, on its western side, runs the ghost of a fosse, the term for the ditch that typically accompanied such earthen constructions, with the material dug from it piled up to form the bank beside it. This fosse survives to a depth of around 0.2 metres and spans nearly 4.7 metres in overall width. What makes the site at Rathbrit quietly complex is that it does not stand alone. A D-shaped enclosure lies immediately to the north-east, two further enclosures sit roughly 15 metres to the east, and other comparable earthworks, barely traceable now, extend to the west and north. Together they suggest a wider pattern of enclosure and boundary-making in this part of Tipperary, the individual elements of which have each weathered down to near-invisibility at their own rate.

The earthworks are most legible in low, raking light, when shadows gather in even the shallowest depressions and the slight rise of the bank separates itself from the surrounding ground. The overall arrangement, with its associated enclosures clustered within a short radius, rewards slow observation rather than a quick glance from a field boundary.