The enclosure is roughly circular, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres across, its bank of sod-covered stone rising less than a metre on the outside and barely half a metre on the interior. Two low field walls, also heather-covered, radiate outward from the enclosure at the south-west and north-east, the remnants of a farming arrangement that once made sense to whoever lived and worked here. Inside, a dense growth of ferns has long since taken over.

This is 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. Tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but each occupies a specific and deliberate position in its local landscape. This one sits in an area of stony heather-covered pasture, much of it now converted to forestry plantation, on ground that rises to the south and south-east while falling away to the north and north-west into a small stream valley about seventy-five metres below. The townland boundary of Ellagh Beg follows the course of that stream, which gives some sense of how old these territorial lines can be, drawn along natural features that long predate any modern administrative boundary. The bank here, about two and a half metres wide, is modest by ringfort standards, suggesting a domestic rather than a high-status enclosure, a family farmstead rather than the seat of a local lord.