What makes An Gabhlán Beag quietly compelling is not any single dramatic feature but the layered quality of what survives: a rath, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, that contains within its banks the compressed remains of the people who once lived inside it.

The enclosure is classed as a univallate rath, meaning it is defined by a single surrounding bank or wall rather than multiple concentric rings. Within that boundary, three hut sites are visible, and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or refuge, may also have existed here, noted briefly by a researcher named Curran. One of the hut sites is marked today by little more than a shallow depression in the ground, measuring roughly four metres north to south and five metres east to west, with a low stone bank surviving along its north-eastern edge, standing about sixty centimetres high and ninety centimetres wide. These dimensions are modest, but they give a sense of how compressed and intimate daily life within such a settlement would have been. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional study that brought many such enclosures into the broader scholarly record for the first time.