It only came to light when someone examined an aerial photograph taken afterwards, the kind of quiet revelation that aerial survey regularly produces in Irish archaeology, picking out earthworks invisible at eye level.

The enclosure is roughly circular and sits on a hill, which is itself suggestive. A raith, sometimes anglicised as rath, is a ringfort, the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The name attached to this hill may be the oldest clue of all. A 1934 publication by Bowman recorded the townland subdivision name as Cnoc na ratha, meaning hill of the fort, yet at that point no fort was actually known to exist there. The placename had preserved a memory of something on the hill long after any visible trace had been obscured or forgotten. The aerial photograph later supplied the physical evidence the name had always implied. What survives today is imperfect; a field fence clips the southern edge of the enclosure, and a drain running on a north-south axis cuts into its western side.