The rath, a type of ringfort formed from an earthen bank and surrounding ditch rather than stone, was once a coherent circular enclosure, probably the defended farmstead of a prosperous family sometime between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Water has since found its own path through the interior, splitting the site and warping its original geometry into something harder to read.

What survives is still substantial enough to give a sense of the original effort involved. To the west of the stream, a semi-circular area remains enclosed by an earthen bank and fosse, the fosse being the external ditch dug to reinforce the bank and deter easy entry. The bank reaches 2.6 metres in height on its outer face, dropping to just one metre above the interior floor, and the fosse to the north and south-west is steep-sided, around 2.4 metres wide and a metre deep. On the eastern side of the surviving enclosure, the ground falls away sharply by 4.7 metres down to the stream bed, a drop that may once have served as a natural defensive advantage. The internal diameter runs to roughly 30 metres north to south and just under 24 metres east to west, dimensions typical of a single-vallate rath, meaning one with a single bank-and-ditch circuit rather than the multiple concentric rings that mark higher-status sites. The panoramic views from the site reach far in every direction, a reminder that whoever chose this location was thinking about visibility as much as enclosure. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded these details and noted the distortion the site had already undergone by that point.