That particular puzzle is part of what makes this ringfort, sitting quietly at the eastern edge of the boggy plain drained by the Feohanagh river on the Dingle Peninsula, worth paying attention to. A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically earthen, used as a farmstead or high-status residence, and this one near Baile An Lochaigh follows the broad pattern: a roughly circular bank enclosing a space about 24 metres across. What sets it apart is the detail embedded in that bank. The inner face is lined with drystone walling rising up to 2 metres, the outer face climbs to 3 metres, and at three separate points around the circuit, to the north-west, south-west, and east-south-east, the bank gives way entirely to stonework. Any one of those sections might be blocking what was once a proper entrance gap, but none of them announces itself clearly enough to settle the question.

The stonework raises other puzzles too. At the south-south-east and south-west, the inner face bows inward, as though the drystone revetment was inserted later to hold back a bank that had already begun to slip. The bulges look structurally consistent with the rest of the facing, which complicates that reading, but the possibility that the stone lining is a secondary addition to an originally earthen enclosure is noted in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region. Outside the main bank, a fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such enclosures, runs for a traceable stretch to the north-east and north, about 2.8 metres wide. For a short section at the north-east there is also a secondary outer bank, 1.2 metres high and just over 4 metres wide, with fragments of stone facing surviving on both its sides, hinting at a more elaborate defensive arrangement than the single-circuit norm.