It is easy to mistake for a natural feature of the landscape, but the geometry gives it away: a roughly subcircular platform, about 29 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, ringed by an earthen bank that still stands up to 1.5 metres high on the south-east side. This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a form of enclosed farmstead that was widespread during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and this one in Dunowla is a good example of how legible such sites remain even after centuries of agricultural use.

The bank retains traces of internal stone facing on its northern arc, suggesting it was once a more substantial construction than its current earthen profile implies. On the south-east to south-west arc, the outer foot of the bank is accompanied by a fosse, a defensive ditch, roughly two metres wide, with its own external bank beyond it. That outer bank reaches about 1.2 metres in height on its exterior face. Elsewhere around the circuit, both the fosse and outer bank have disappeared entirely. Modern farming has left its mark throughout: sections of the inner bank between west-south-west and west-north-west have been absorbed into a later field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, and the external bank has similarly been incorporated into another field boundary. The two gaps in the inner bank, one at the north-east and one at the east, appear to be relatively recent breaks rather than original entrances. Perhaps the most intriguing detail is inside the enclosure itself: a short distance west of centre, a low bank outlines a subrectangular area that may be the footprint of a house, a dwelling once protected by all those concentric earthworks.