What sits on top looks, at first glance, like little more than a grassy rise and a few uneven field margins. Look more carefully, and the ground arranges itself into the faint but legible outline of a rath, a type of enclosed circular settlement common in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and used as a farmstead or place of local significance. This one has held its name, Rathtooreen, on Ordnance Survey maps since at least 1838, which suggests the local memory of what it was never entirely faded, even as the land around it was divided up and put to use.

The enclosure is roughly 23.5 metres in diameter. On its western side, the original earthen bank still survives as a low, sod-covered rise, about 4.5 metres wide, standing just over a metre above the surrounding ground on its outer face. Along the northern edge, where the natural slope of the knoll adds to the effect, the exterior face reaches 2.5 metres, giving that side a noticeably steeper profile than the rest. A shallow ditch runs along the outer edge to the south-west and north-west, though this appears to be a later field ditch rather than the original fosse, the defensive trench that would have accompanied the bank when the rath was in use. The eastern half of the bank has been largely levelled, surviving only as a low scarp with a slight internal rim, and it is on this side that an entrance gap of around two metres opens onto the gentler slope of the knoll. Running through the interior, a low rise of field bank crosses on a roughly north-north-west to south-south-west axis, aligned with field boundaries that meet the rath at its northern and southern edges, a reminder that the enclosure was absorbed into the working farmland around it long before anyone thought to record it.