One is a ringfort, or rath, a type of circular enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead. This one is univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the double or triple rings found at more elaborate examples. That bank is reasonably well preserved, standing 2 metres high on its outer face and enclosing an interior roughly 37 to 38 metres across. To the south, a fosse, the external ditch dug to heighten the bank's defensive effect, survives at 4.4 metres wide, cut about 0.7 metres below the level of the surrounding land. Immediately to its northeast sits a smaller, sub-square enclosure with rounded corners, measuring 22 metres on each side and rising only slightly above the ground surface.

That second enclosure has a paper trail of its own, and an odd gap in it. In 1756, the Cork-born physician and antiquarian Charles Smith described a square bawn near Astee. A bawn was a walled or embanked enclosure, often associated with plantation-era settlements, built to protect livestock from raids. Smith was specific about its purpose, recording that it was constructed 'as a place of strength to preserve cattle from being carried off by an enemy'. Yet when the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited the area in 1909, he could find no trace of it. The sub-square enclosure immediately northeast of the rath is now considered a likely candidate for the feature Smith recorded, its rounded corners and low profile perhaps explaining why Westropp, looking for something more obviously structural, passed it by. Whether the enclosure is genuinely connected to any plantation-era activity or represents an earlier feature that Smith simply described in terms familiar to his own century remains an open question.