Two ringforts sitting roughly fifty metres apart in the same stretch of level Kildare pasture is not something you come across every day. The better-known of the two draws the eye, but the one at Coolree quietly holds its own, even if it takes some patience to read the landscape and find it. A rath is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically circular, defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and built to house a farming family and their livestock somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one is worn down to its barest essentials: a shallow sub-circular enclosure, roughly 27 metres across at its widest, surviving more as a suggestion in the ground than a legible monument.

What remains is a low earthen bank on the south-west arc, standing no more than thirty centimetres above the exterior ground surface and about fifteen centimetres above the interior. Elsewhere the boundary has eroded to a faint scarp barely twenty centimetres high. An outer fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank, still traces part of the circuit, ranging between two and a half metres wide in places and dropping to as little as ten centimetres in depth. A gap of about three and a half metres on the southern side may preserve the line of the original entrance. None of this appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, which suggests either that it had already been significantly reduced by that point or that the surveyors simply did not register something so low-lying. By 2005 it had become overgrown enough to be visible from aerial photography mainly by the texture of the vegetation rather than any obvious earthwork.