That detail alone gives pause. A rath, as this type of monument is commonly known, is a roughly circular enclosure built from earthen banks and ditches, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, between about 500 and 1000 AD. They served as farmsteads, enclosing a family's dwelling and perhaps some livestock, and they were built in their thousands across the island. Most retain at least a trace of where people once walked in and out. At Askinch, that trace is simply absent.

The enclosure itself is a slightly raised oval of rough pasture, measuring 44 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west. An earthen bank, between 3.5 and 4.5 metres wide, defines the northern to southern arc, though it has been absorbed into a later field boundary in places, which is a common fate for these monuments as agricultural land use shifts across the centuries. On the eastern and southern sides, an external fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such a bank, survives to a width of five to six metres at its top, though it is now quite shallow. A stream lies roughly 250 metres to the north-east, following a north-west to south-east course, which would have provided a reliable water source close enough to be useful without threatening the elevated position of the site itself. That elevation, on a slope dropping away to the east, would have given whoever lived here a clear view across the surrounding land, a consideration that was never purely aesthetic.