The circular enclosure that once stood here, roughly 35 metres across, has been levelled so thoroughly that only a faint curving rise in the ground betrays its former outline. Yet the site has a quiet persistence to it. Set on a low elevation with the ground falling away to the north-west into a natural depression of wet pasture, it occupies the kind of position that early medieval farmers chose carefully, with open sightlines in most directions and a defensible relationship with the surrounding terrain.

A rath, to borrow the Irish term still commonly used, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, typically serving as a farmstead during the early medieval period, from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across Ireland, and many have vanished into the farmed landscape precisely as this one has. The enclosure at Corbally was still legible enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, crossed near its north-eastern interior by a field boundary running on a north-west to south-east axis. By the time later map editions were produced, it had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely. Today, to the south-west of that field wall, the levelled bank can just about be traced as a slight undulation in the turf; to the north-east, even that much is gone, and the circuit survives only as a crop mark, a ghostly discolouration visible in aerial conditions when the grass above the buried arc grows differently from its surroundings.

The site does not stand alone in the landscape. Approximately 300 metres to the south-west lies another rath, and roughly the same distance to the north-east sits a ringbarrow, a low circular mound associated with funerary or ritual use in the prehistoric period. The clustering of these monuments suggests a stretch of ground that was, over a long span of time, considered significant in more than one way.