The poorly preserved remains at Derradda are thought to be those of a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically as a farmstead or place of habitation. What sets this particular site apart, however, is the presence of a children's burial ground in its interior, a pairing that would have seemed less unusual to earlier generations than it does now.

Children's burial grounds of this kind, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered, under Catholic tradition, ineligible for consecrated ground. They were frequently sited at pre-Christian or otherwise liminal locations, ringforts among them, reflecting a long-held folk association between such places and a kind of neutral, in-between sanctity. The earthen bank at Derradda survives only along an arc running from roughly south-west to north-north-west, measuring around 22 metres, and its full original circuit has been further disrupted by a road cutting across the site. The 1945 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a line of hachures, the cartographic convention used to suggest earthworks and relief, though even then its condition was evidently fragmentary.

The site sits in level grassland, which makes the surviving bank easy to spot once you know to look for it, though it reads more as a gentle swell in the turf than any commanding earthwork. The presence of the children's burial ground within the enclosure means the interior carries the quiet weight of a place that served, across many centuries and in very different ways, as a boundary between the living world and whatever lay beyond it.