A rath is typically a circular earthen enclosure dating from the early medieval period, used as a farmstead or place of local defence, but the earthwork here belongs to an entirely different tradition and a much more recent century. Recorded by the historian Davies in 1948, the site was constructed by Colonel Wolseley in 1689, placing it squarely in the turbulent period following the Williamite-Jacobite conflict, when fortified positions across Ireland were being hurriedly raised or reinforced. Its misclassification as a ringfort is itself a quiet curiosity, a seventeenth-century military earthwork wearing the label of something a thousand years older.

The original structure, according to Bradley and Dunne of the OPW, was probably square in plan with salient angled bastions projecting from each corner, a form more associated with early modern military engineering than with anything prehistoric or early Christian. A bastion of this type was designed to eliminate blind spots in a fortification's field of fire, allowing defenders to cover the adjacent walls. Of that confident geometry, very little survives intact. The southern side remains the most substantial, presenting a linear earthen rampart with an external fosse, which is a defensive ditch, and bastions at either end. Very faint traces of the north-western bastion are still legible in the ground. The rest has been gradually consumed. The western and eastern ramparts, along with the north-eastern bastion, were lost to grave-digging over generations, and the northern rampart now lies directly beneath the graveyard wall and the roadway running along its outer edge. A Church of Ireland chapel occupies much of the interior, meaning the living, the dead, and the road have between them quietly dismantled most of what Wolseley's men once built.