That impenetrability is, in its own way, fitting. The site is a rath, the Irish word for a ringfort, a type of enclosed circular settlement built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one at Barleyhill has retreated so completely behind its thorny screen that only the outer edges can really be read at all.

What survives is a circular raised platform somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres in diameter, defined by a stony scarp, essentially a steep earthen and stone bank that has been cut quite vertically on its outer face. The scarp varies in height around its circuit, standing at around 0.9 metres at the south-west, rising to 1.5 metres at the north-north-west, and dropping back to 0.6 metres at the north. A slight stony lip survives on the inner face at the north-west, and stones protrude unevenly from the external slope. Hawthorn rings it thickly on the outside, while blackthorn has colonised the interior almost completely, leaving only the south-east quadrant in any way accessible. A field wall running on a roughly west-north-west to east-south-east axis cuts across the southern edge, a reminder that working farmland has long since been organised around the structure without much ceremony. A second rath sits roughly two hundred metres to the east, suggesting that this low, wet landscape once supported a cluster of enclosed farmsteads rather than an isolated one.

The setting is worth understanding before visiting. The rath occupies a gentle rise surrounded by wettish pasture and boggy hollows, with the ground falling away to damp fields to the west-north-west. The thorns make a close inspection of the interior essentially impossible, so what the site offers is really a sense of outline and presence rather than any legible detail within.