What marks this particular site out is the way its ancient geometry has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it: a modern field boundary runs along the western and north-eastern edges, following the old enclosure so closely that it is difficult to say where the medieval meets the contemporary.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were the homes of farming families, defined by one or more earthen banks with an external ditch, or fosse, designed to keep livestock in and predators or opportunists out. The Coolaleen example is modest in scale: roughly 24 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, defined by a scarped edge about a metre and fifteen centimetres high and three and a half metres wide. Outside that bank, a fosse runs from the south-west to the north-east, reaching around six metres wide in places and nearly half a metre deep. At the north-eastern end, the ditch terminates at a water-filled depression, while the south-eastern stretch has been partially filled in over time. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The interior slopes gently downward toward the centre and is covered in tall grass, while the enclosing bank has been colonised by bushes that are gradually pressing inward. There is no formal access or signage, and the site sits within working pasture, so the appropriate caution around private land applies. The water-filled hollow at the north-eastern end of the fosse is worth looking for, as it gives a sense of how the original ditch may once have held water around a greater portion of the circuit. The encroaching scrub, while obscuring the bank in places, also preserves it from the kind of agricultural disturbance that has erased so many comparable sites elsewhere in the county.