Beneath their canopy lies a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of these survive across Ireland, but most sit in open fields or on hillsides. This one has ended up inside a convent, its ancient boundary quietly absorbed into a very different kind of enclosed life.

The structure itself is well preserved. A roughly circular earthen bank, measuring approximately 31 metres east to west and 28 metres north to south, rises to around two metres in height and is accompanied by a wide, shallow external fosse, essentially a ditch dug to reinforce the bank. The fosse, which reaches a maximum depth of 0.6 metres, runs from the southwest to the northeast of the site. The interior is saucer-shaped and grass-covered, sloping gently inward, and there is a small circular depression near the southern inner edge of the bank, about three metres across and half a metre deep, the purpose of which is not recorded. Such depressions inside ringforts can sometimes indicate the former site of a structure, a souterrain entrance, or simply centuries of accumulated disturbance, but without excavation it is impossible to say more.

The beech trees planted along the bank give the site an unexpectedly formal appearance, as though the rath has been landscaped into the convent grounds rather than simply left within them. It sits in level pasture, which is relatively unusual; many ringforts occupy elevated ground chosen for visibility or drainage. Here, the surrounding terrain is flat, and the bank itself provides the only significant elevation for some distance around it.