The ringfort at Cross is a rath, the most common type of enclosed settlement in early Irish history, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank enclosing a farmyard where a family lived, kept animals, and stored food. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is less its grandeur than its predicament: the public road cuts across the northeast, farm access tracks close in from the east, southwest, and northwest, and somewhere beneath those roads there was probably once a continuous fosse, the defensive ditch that would have ringed the whole enclosure.

The site itself is modest but legible. The circular area measures around thirty metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank three to four metres wide and roughly eighty centimetres high on the interior. At the southwest, where the roads have not entirely swallowed it, the external fosse survives, about three and a half metres wide and a metre deep, offering a glimpse of what the complete circuit would have looked like. The original entrance, just two metres wide, faces north, a fairly typical orientation for a rath. A modern gap of four metres at the northwest is a later intrusion, probably made for agricultural convenience at some point after the site ceased to function as a settlement. No internal features are visible above ground, so whatever structures once stood inside, timber buildings most likely, have left no obvious surface trace.