A rath, to give it its Irish term, was typically a circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and defended residence during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. This one at Gorteen is roughly forty-two metres across in both directions, which puts it at a fairly typical size, though what makes it quietly interesting is the unevenness of its survival: the western half remains well-defined, while the eastern half has been levelled almost to nothing.

The western scarp still rises to about two and a half metres, and its slope has been co-opted over the years as a field boundary, which is a common fate for earthworks that farmers found easier to incorporate than to remove. On the south-south-west to north-west arc, the fosse, the ditch that ran outside the main bank, is still four metres wide, and the external bank beyond it stands nearly two metres high on its outer face. Moving around to the north and east, these features gradually fade: the fosse becomes a shallow depression, the outer bank an almost imperceptible ripple in the ground. A road has cut through the north-east to east section entirely. A ring of hawthorn follows the circuit of the rath, hawthorn being a tree long associated with such sites in Irish tradition and often the most immediate visual clue that an earthwork lies beneath the pasture. Local knowledge holds that a souterrain lies within the interior, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or concealment, though it has not been excavated or fully documented. The slight rise in the interior's north-west quadrant may be related to this feature. Two further raths sit within two hundred metres to the north-north-east and north-east, which suggests this was once a landscape of some density, with multiple enclosed farmsteads occupying the same ridge.