That detail, recorded by a local man named R. H. Spratt of Pencil Hill sometime before 1905, is one of the few surviving clues about what once went on inside this unassuming earthwork on the slope above Baltydaniel. The rath, a type of ringfort formed from a raised circular bank and surrounding ditch rather than from stone, sits atop a small hillock on a north-facing slope, its bank and fosse so heavily overgrown as to read more like a natural feature than anything deliberately constructed. Yet the dimensions tell a different story: the enclosed area measures roughly 28 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, with an internal bank face rising over two metres above the interior floor and a ditch still descending more than a metre and a half at its deepest point.

Ringforts, the most common type of early medieval monument in Ireland, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, though the form persisted later in some areas. This particular example retains a causewayed entrance, a gap left in the ditch with a solid strip of ground bridging it, positioned to the west-northwest and just over two and a half metres wide. The fosse is most pronounced along the north-east to south-south-west arc and becomes progressively shallower as it curves round to the north-west, where it has largely silted in. The interior is grass-covered and slightly raised, sloping gently down toward the entrance. A second ringfort lies nearby, and it is this pair that the local historian James Grove White noted in his multi-volume survey of Cork antiquities, published between 1905 and 1925, describing them as two interesting raths to the west of what was then called Pencil Hill House, a property now known as Beechfield House. Spratt's account of excavation there, producing a broken bow among other unspecified relics, suggests at least some informal digging took place, though no formal record of those finds appears to have survived beyond his testimony.