A low, battered earthwork, subcircular in plan and measuring roughly 38 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, sits just 50 metres to the south-southeast of Ballynakill Church. It lies just outside the line of an early ecclesiastical enclosure associated with the church, which means that whoever lived within this rath was, in effect, a near-neighbour of an early Christian religious community, separated by little more than a boundary ditch.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, typically a circular or subcircular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were built and used mainly between the early medieval period and the Norman arrival, serving as enclosed farmsteads for families of varying social rank. This example has not fared well. The enclosing bank is described as low and breached in multiple places by cattle gaps, the kind of gradual erosion that comes from centuries of agricultural use with no particular reason to preserve what looked, to later farmers, like an inconvenient mound in a field. Along the southern side, a later field bank has been laid directly over the original enclosing element, further obscuring whatever profile once defined that arc of the circuit. What remains is fragmentary enough that the relationship between the rath and the nearby ecclesiastical site, so suggestive on a map, is now largely a matter of inference rather than anything a visitor could read clearly on the ground.