The ditch that once defended the enclosure's southern perimeter has long since been pressed into service as a farm trackway, its outer edge now defined by a stone field wall rather than anything recognisably ancient. Elsewhere around the circuit, the ditch has almost vanished, surviving only as a faint hollow in the pasture. The enclosure itself, meanwhile, carries mature trees along the crown of its bank, giving it the look of something deliberate and permanent, which in a sense it still is.

A rath is a type of ringfort, a circular or near-circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, most commonly built during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads and status markers, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This example in Gearha, west of the Gaddagh river in the Iveragh peninsula of south Kerry, is what surveyors classify as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than two or three concentric ones. The bank itself is substantial: nearly four metres in external height at the south-east, flat-topped, and up to eight metres wide at its base. On the western side it retains stone revetment facing, suggesting the original builders reinforced the earthwork with carefully placed stonework. A gap of just over two metres in the north-east marks the original entrance. Inside, close to the southern bank, a low stony mound roughly eight metres square may be the remains of a hut, the kind of structure that would once have made the enclosed space a working homestead rather than simply a defensive ring. The interior is notably level, which would have been useful for everyday life, and the overall diameter runs to about twenty-eight metres north to south.