The interior is markedly sunken, dropping steeply from the western bank down to the centre, and a broad ridge of earth and stones runs almost the full length of the eastern half. Both features suggest the site has been quarried at some point, its material extracted and the original form disrupted, leaving an enclosure that reads as much like a wound in the ground as a coherent monument.

A rath is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built as a farmstead or settlement boundary and defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch. This one sits on an east-northeast-facing slope beside a small, wet valley in undulating pasture, with a lake about 230 metres to the north. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 recorded it as a circular, ringfort-sized feature ringed by trees and absorbed into a field boundary running northwest to southeast. By the 1929 edition, its shape had been described as polygonal rather than circular, a shift that may reflect genuine changes to the earthwork over the intervening decades, or simply a different surveyor's eye. The bank itself survives, measuring up to three metres wide on the western side, with an external height of around 1.4 metres there. A field ditch runs along the outside of the western bank and continues northward to join the broader field drainage system, so the enclosure has been thoroughly folded into the working agricultural landscape around it. Hawthorn, brambles, ash, and Scots pine now ring the perimeter. A second rath lies just 120 metres to the south-southwest, which suggests this part of Rathglass was once a busier place than its quiet pasture now implies.