It is not a souterrain, the underground passage sometimes built within Irish ringforts to serve as a storage chamber or escape route, and beyond that the record goes quiet. That kind of small uncertainty, something purposefully made and then forgotten, gives this particular rath in Culliagh a quietly unsettling quality.

The rath itself is a well-preserved example of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was built across Ireland in the early medieval period, typically between the seventh and tenth centuries. A raised circular platform, roughly 32 metres across, is enclosed by an earthen bank that reaches close to three metres in external height on its northern and north-western side. Stones protrude here and there from the inner face of the bank, and a gap of around two metres at the east-north-east is thought to be where the original entrance once stood. A 1919 Ordnance Survey map shows hatching outside the bank at the east-south-east, suggesting a fosse, the defensive ditch that often ran around such enclosures, though nothing visible survives there now. On the north-western side, however, a slight depression in the ground, given extra definition by the natural rise of the terrain beyond it, may mark where a fosse once ran. The interior is otherwise level, apart from a gently raised area in the north-west quadrant whose purpose is equally unclear.

The rath sits on the northern side of a rise in pasture land, with open views available from its elevated position. A belt of deciduous woodland borders the northern edge of the field, and the bank itself is encircled by oak, hazel, birch and hawthorn, giving the whole structure an enclosed, almost chamber-like atmosphere when approached from within. A field fence that once ran immediately to the east of the monument has since been removed, which may have improved the sense of how the original form read in the landscape.