What gives it away, if anything does, is the thick collar of hawthorn, hazel, and brambles that encircles it almost completely, a kind of accidental hedge that has preserved the outline of the bank long after the structure it once protected ceased to matter to anyone living. Inside that perimeter, the ground slopes quietly downward from north to south, and clumps of brambles have colonised the interior as thoroughly as the edges.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in the country. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, and were built in their thousands across Ireland between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. The Gortaneden example is modest in scale, measuring approximately 23.6 metres east to west and 21 metres north to south, with an earthen and stone bank that survives best on the northern arc, where it still stands close to a metre high on the exterior face. On the south-western and eastern sides the bank has been reduced to little more than a scarp, worn down over centuries of agricultural activity. Stones heaped along the top of the bank are almost certainly the result of field clearance rather than original construction, a reminder that the surrounding land has been worked continuously long after whoever built the rath was forgotten. Just outside the bank on the north side, a shallow depression about 2.5 metres wide may be the remnant of an enclosing fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank as a boundary. Roughly 30 metres to the south-west lies a separate cairn, a mound of stones that may indicate the site sits within a broader landscape of early activity, though the relationship between the two monuments is not recorded.