What makes it worth a second look is a small but deliberate piece of problem-solving built into its design: because the ground slopes away to the south, the interior has been raised on that side to create a roughly level platform. Someone, roughly fifteen hundred years ago, compensated for the hillside rather than simply accepting it.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are often called, was the standard homestead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Families lived inside the bank and used the enclosed ground for livestock, storage, and domestic buildings. The one at Ardra Beg measures approximately thirty metres east to west and twenty-nine metres north to south, making it a fairly typical example in terms of scale. Its defences are a combination of elements: an earthen bank standing about 1.2 metres above the interior along the southern and eastern arc, a scarp, essentially a cut or drop in the natural ground, reaching about 1.5 metres on the eastern side, and an external fosse, a ditch, roughly 1.5 metres deep, running around the western and northern portions. The variation in technique around the circuit most likely reflects both the different gradients encountered and a practical approach to using the slope itself as part of the defensive arrangement where the bank alone would have been less effective.