A rath, as this type of enclosure is generally known, is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the first millennium AD. Here, on a north-west-facing slope in pasture near Castletownroche in north Cork, what remains of the enclosure amounts to a low earthen bank running roughly south to north-north-west, standing no more than 0.3 metres above the ground on its outer face. That is barely knee-height, and in long grass it would be easy to miss entirely.

The arc of bank that survives, roughly 24 metres in length, was recorded as recently as 1935 on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appeared as a sweep of hachures along the western side of a north-south field boundary. The external fosse, the ditch that once ran around the outside of the bank, has since been filled with field clearance stones, the kind of gradual practical erasure that has claimed countless similar sites across Ireland. A rock outcrop breaks the line of the bank at one point. The eastern portion of what would have been a complete circular enclosure no longer survives above ground at all; that section of the fosse is visible only as a cropmark in aerial photography, a ghostly difference in the rate at which grass or crops grow over the buried ditch beneath.