Raths, the earthen ringforts that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, were typically the enclosed homesteads of prosperous farming families, defined by one or more circular or oval banks and, usually, an outer ditch. This one in Acres townland, Co. Clare, has lost nearly all of those defining features. The outer fosse is gone entirely, the original entrance has left no trace, and the northern portion of the interior appears to have been deliberately dug out at some point, leaving a long, sloping inner face where a more regular profile might once have existed.

The site was considered significant enough to be marked with hachures on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1842 and 1915, which suggests it was still a recognisable earthwork through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time formal monument records were compiled in the 1990s, it had been downgraded in description to a plain 'Enclosure', a label that signals uncertainty about what, precisely, is left. What can be measured today is an oval bank of earth and stone, roughly 24 metres east to west and just under 21 metres north to south from crest to crest, between 4.6 and 6.1 metres wide but rising to a maximum height of only 0.8 metres. Some of that bulk is not original; field clearance stones have been added to the bank over the years, quietly folding the prehistoric boundary into the working landscape of later centuries. A townland boundary wall cuts across the northern interior on a northwest to southeast line, and a ruined field wall sits directly on top of the bank at the northwest, each addition a small record of how agricultural life gradually absorbed and obscured the earlier one.