Whether that name refers to the reddish earth of the bank, the colour of the surrounding land, or something else entirely has been lost, but the name itself suggests the site was distinct enough in local memory to be marked out from its neighbours. It sits with a commanding view over the surrounding countryside, which was almost certainly part of the point.

The earthwork belongs to a type known as a univallate rath, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than multiple concentric rings. A rath of this kind would typically have served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, enclosing a household and its dependants behind an earthen rampart and a fosse, the external ditch that runs around the outside. At Dromgower, the numbers give a sense of real solidity: the bank averages 6.7 metres at its base, rises to 1.8 metres above the fosse, and the internal area spans roughly 32 metres north to south and 34.6 metres east to west. Two entrances break the circuit, one to the north at about five metres wide and a narrower one to the south-southwest. Inside, in the southwestern to western sector, there is an oblong stone enclosure measuring six by seventeen metres externally, with walls a metre thick, identified as a possible house-site. Just to its west, a small stony mound may indicate a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge. A fieldbank runs along the exterior of the northeastern sector, suggesting the site has been integrated into the agricultural landscape over many centuries without being entirely erased.