A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built predominantly during the early medieval period as a farmstead for a family of some local standing. This one at Dungillick is unremarkable in the grandest sense, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. It is the kind of site that a farmer passes daily without much thought, the bank folded so naturally into the field boundary that the two have become, over centuries, almost indistinguishable.

What gives the site its quiet interest is the paper trail of its gradual disappearance. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1834, the enclosure was still complete and clearly legible as a circular form. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1907, only a portion of that enclosure remained visible. The bank running from the south-west, around the west, and on to the north side survives with a chord measurement of approximately 31 metres, enough to suggest the original scale of the enclosure without fully conveying what has been lost. The site sits roughly 100 metres south-west of Dungillick House, positioned as so many raths are, on elevated ground that would have commanded good views of the surrounding landscape, here the characteristic hummocked terrain of drumlin country in Monaghan. Locally, it is still referred to simply as a fort, the folk memory of its significance outlasting much of the physical structure itself.