Most ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that were built in their thousands across early medieval Ireland, consist of a single bank and ditch. This one has two earthen banks with a fosse, a defensive ditch, between them, and the remains of a further outer fosse beyond that. The arrangement gives it a more fortified character than the typical agricultural enclosure, and the landscape setting adds its own quiet weight: level pasture opening out to long views south-west towards Macgillycuddy's Reeks.

The rath's outline is still readable on the ground, though not uniformly so. The inner bank, roughly 3.65 metres wide and rising to about 2.1 metres on its exterior face, is traceable from the ESE around to the NNW, though it disappears under heavy vegetation along much of the southern arc. The outer bank and its associated fosse survive from the ENE to the NNW, and intermittent traces of the shallow outermost ditch appear in the same general range. Modern intrusions have complicated the northeastern arc considerably: the N22 road and a wall have both cut through it, and it was the upgrading of that road in the 1990s that prompted excavation of a strip along the northeastern side. What the excavator, working in 1994, found there was not the kind of domestic debris most often associated with these sites. Instead there was a spread of burnt soil, stone, and iron pan sitting on a gravel layer, which the excavator interpreted as evidence of some form of smelting or metalworking. That would make the enclosure not simply a farmstead but a place of craft production, though the evidence remains partial. The level interior also contains what may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, and traces of a possible hut site.