The enclosure it once formed, roughly twenty and a half metres across, sits in hilly farmland in County Galway, and it takes a careful eye to recognise it for what it is. Most of the structure has been swallowed by vegetation, but at the southern edge, where the growth thins out, the original drystone foundations are just visible, with a modern field wall built directly on top of them, the living farm having quietly cannibalised the ancient one.

Circular enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and are thought to date from the early medieval period, though many remain undated without excavation. They functioned variously as settlement enclosures, farmsteads, or stock enclosures, the drystone technique using carefully fitted unmortared stone being a common building method in areas where suitable material was plentiful. At Cnocán Raithní, the modest diameter suggests a small-scale domestic or agricultural use rather than anything more ceremonial. The fact that a later field wall was laid directly over the earlier foundations is itself a common pattern in Irish rural landscapes, where generations of farmers have worked the same ground and repurposed whatever stone lay to hand.