A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is an enclosed circular farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch. The one at Rathpatrick has been levelled by agricultural reclamation, absorbed back into the flat grassland around it until it looks, to most eyes, like nothing at all.

The site appears on the Grand Jury Map, the pre-Ordnance Survey county mapping produced under the authority of the grand juries that administered Irish counties before the reforms of the nineteenth century, labelled plainly as a rath. By the time it was inspected in 1987, the monument had been reduced to a roughly circular, artificially flat area of about twenty-five metres in diameter, discernible only to someone who knew what they were looking for. The low-lying position, on the valley bottom with open views in all directions, is characteristic of many such enclosures; the elevated sightlines would have made the original site practical for a farming household keeping watch over livestock and land. What was once a defined boundary, a raised ring of earth marking the edge of a family's world, is now just a subtle interruption in the texture of a reclaimed field.