A rath is a roughly circular earthen or stone enclosure, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and this one at Kilteenbane has reached a point where much of what it contains is no longer reachable. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that would once have served for storage or refuge, is now inaccessible. Three hut sites have been identified within the enclosure, the structures known individually as clochans, the dry-stone corbelled buildings characteristic of early Christian and early medieval Kerry. The third of these, recorded in the northern sector of the interior, is surrounded by growth so dense that only a metre to a metre and a half of its outer eastern wall-face can actually be seen.

The site was documented as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986 under the direction of J. Cuppage. That survey captured a moment in the life of a site already well on its way to being reclaimed. The flat ground it occupies sits at an edge, geographically speaking, caught between the upward pull of Corrin mountain to the west and the corridor of the Finglas river to the east. That positioning, a sheltered level platform at the foot of higher ground near a water source, is exactly the kind of location early settlers sought out, and it helps explain why the enclosure and its cluster of stone buildings ended up here at all. What the survey could record, it did; what the vegetation had already taken, it noted with the particular restraint of field archaeology confronting nature.