A rath, to give the broader context, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead for a single family and their livestock. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of repair; this one sits on a gentle rise in mixed pasture in County Mayo, and has been losing ground to agriculture and scrub for a long time.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1922 under the name Rathoe. On the earlier map it reads as a circular embanked enclosure; by 1922 it had already shifted in form, recorded as an oval measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, with its north-western arc either absorbed into or cut by field boundaries. A field fence now runs directly through the centre of the enclosure on a roughly north-northwest to south-southeast axis, effectively dividing the rath in two. The eastern half has been levelled and survives only as a faint rise along its perimeter edge. The western half fares differently, not through preservation exactly, but through abandonment: it is now dense with blackthorn, hawthorn, and brambles, which obscures it while also, in a roundabout way, protecting what remains. The one accessible stretch, along the south to south-west arc, reveals a low stone bank about 3.3 metres wide, its outer face rising to around 0.6 metres, possibly the remnant of a collapsed wall. A circular heap of stones roughly 4 to 5 metres in diameter sits in the interior near the south-west quadrant, noted on the 1922 map as a small hachured feature. Whether this represents something deliberately built or simply an accumulation of cleared fieldstone is uncertain; it leans towards the latter. Another enclosure sits approximately 50 metres to the south-west, suggesting this corner of Carrowcrom was, at some point, a more populated landscape than it now appears.