What remains is a roughly circular enclosure about fifty metres across, defined by a bank and an outer fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug around the perimeter to reinforce the barrier formed by the bank above it. The bank itself is modest, rising only about thirty centimetres on its inner face but a more substantial one and a half metres on the outside, a difference that reflects how the ditch material was piled up on the interior side. That asymmetry is a small but telling detail, the kind of thing that rewards a careful look at what might otherwise seem like an unremarkable rise in a field.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, ranging from well-defined earthworks to barely perceptible crop marks visible only from the air. The Baunaghra example is on the less showy end of that spectrum. The bank and fosse survive only on the northern to south-western arc, and beyond that partial earthwork there are no other visible surface remains. Whatever structures once stood inside, timber buildings, a farmstead, perhaps a small hall, have long since vanished. What is left is the boundary itself, and only part of that.