This particular example, in the townland of Farnane, is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. A rath is essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family would have kept their livestock at night and conducted the business of daily life. At Farnane, scrub vegetation has crept in around the monument, softening its outline and making it easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at.

The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with details uploaded in June 2013. What the survey found is modest in scale but consistent in form: a roughly circular area measuring approximately 27 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank that survives to an internal height of about 0.3 metres and an external height of 0.4 metres, with a width of just over two metres. The gap in the south-western portion of the bank, some three metres across, most likely marks the original entrance, a feature that appears with some regularity in raths across Munster and is generally interpreted as the point through which people, animals, and goods would have passed. The rath sits at the base of a gentle south-west-facing slope, set within gently rolling pasture, with open views in most directions. To the west, however, the ground rises sharply, which would have limited sightlines in that direction and perhaps influenced the placement of the entrance on the opposite side.

The field setting means access depends on the landowner's permission, as is the case with the majority of ringforts surviving on agricultural land in Ireland. The monument sits within working pasture, so the ground underfoot can be soft in wetter months. The enclosing bank is low enough that it might initially read as a natural undulation in the field, so it helps to approach from a distance and look for the circular outline rather than focusing on any single section of earthwork. The scrub growth noted in the survey record is worth bearing in mind; vegetation tends to colonise these sites precisely because the banks and internal areas are rarely ploughed, meaning the topography beneath is often better preserved than it first appears.