The rath here measures roughly 37 metres in diameter, but the bank that once defined its perimeter has been so thoroughly worn down, or denuded, that across the western, northern, and north-eastern arcs it has vanished from the surface entirely. A trackway cuts straight across the monument at its northern and north-eastern edges, and several field walls have been built directly over what remains of the enclosing element. The cumulative effect is that the outline of the original enclosure is more a matter of archaeological record than of anything a casual eye would catch.

A rath is a type of ringfort, a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, roughly the period from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They functioned as farmsteads, the bank and ditch serving as a boundary for a household and its livestock rather than as serious fortification. The Bunnaconeen example is associated with a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, which in Irish archaeology is recorded as a component feature of many ringforts and is thought to have served for storage or occasional refuge. A further earthwork and another souterrain lie approximately 100 metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of north Galway once supported a modest cluster of early medieval activity, even if the physical evidence is now fragmentary and partially buried beneath the working landscape of later centuries.