A rath, as these early medieval earthwork enclosures are known, was typically a circular or sub-rectangular banked enclosure used as a farmstead, and thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one, at Blackbottom in County Kilkenny, did not fare especially well. By the time cartographers returned to revise the six-inch maps at the turn of the twentieth century, a new field boundary had been cut across the southern half of the enclosure, the bank there levelled to make way for agricultural land, and what had once measured roughly 43 metres by 30 metres was reduced to its northern portion alone.

What survives sits at the southern end of a small north-south valley, positioned at the meeting point of the flat valley floor and a moderately steep western slope, in what is now reclaimed grassland. The remaining bank is still legible: about 1.1 metres in height on the interior face, 1.5 metres externally, and roughly five metres across in total width. An entrance gap of about three metres opens in the north-west sector. The 1839 Ordnance Survey map shows the enclosure clearly, along with a telling detail: the field boundary that ran north-south to the west of the rath kinked slightly outward to avoid it, suggesting the monument was then still largely intact and actively worked around rather than through. By 1900, that kink was gone. The western boundary had been straightened to run directly along the surviving bank, the southern portion removed, and the agricultural logic of the landscape had reasserted itself.

The interior of what remains is level but heavily overgrown with trees and scrub, making the earthwork easier to read from the outside than from within. The view northward along the valley is open, though the surrounding slopes confine the outlook in most other directions, giving the site a quietly enclosed quality that the original builders may well have appreciated for reasons of their own.