A low ring of earth in a Kildare pasture field is easy to dismiss as a natural undulation in the ground, and in truth it barely rises above the surrounding grass. But the slight circular bank here at Daars describes something far older: a rath, or ringfort, of the kind that served as a farmstead enclosure throughout early medieval Ireland. This one is modest even by the standards of the type, with an internal diameter of just 19.5 metres and an earthen bank that stands no more than 0.8 metres on its outer face. A shallow fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the sense of enclosure, traces the perimeter outside the bank.

What gives the site a quiet geographical logic is its position on a slightly raised tongue of pasture land, caught between two northward-flowing watercourses. The Morell River runs roughly 150 metres to the east, and a tributary of the Morell curves around some 200 metres to the west, so whoever chose this spot understood something about defensibility and drainage. A causewayed entrance at the south-west, a raised crossing over the fosse that would have formed the main approach, was still identifiable when the site was examined in 1955, though it is no longer visible today. Close by, approximately 150 metres to the south-south-west, lie two fullachta fiadh, the burnt mounds associated with prehistoric cooking or industrial activity, in which large quantities of fire-cracked stone mark the sites of ancient trough-boiling. Their proximity to the rath is unlikely to be coincidental, suggesting this small headland between two rivers had been a place of activity long before the ringfort was ever built.