The oval rath at Gorteenapheebera is not a dramatic ruin. It measures roughly 35.5 metres along its longer axis, running west-southwest to east-northeast, and what survives of its enclosure is a mixture of a low earthen bank on one side and a simple scarp, a slight drop in the ground, doing the same job elsewhere. It is the kind of monument that rewards attention rather than spectacle.

A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, typically circular or oval, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and once home to a farming family of middling status in Gaelic Ireland. Most date to somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries, though they are notoriously difficult to pin down without excavation. What makes the Gorteenapheebera example quietly interesting is not the enclosure itself but what lies within it. In the western sector of the interior, a souterrain has been recorded. Souterrains are dry-stone underground passages or chambers, built by the same communities that constructed the raths above them, and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. The presence of one here suggests this was a functioning settlement of some complexity, even if the surface remains are now too worn to convey that easily. The enclosing bank has been further obscured by later agricultural activity; field walls overlay it to the northwest and another cuts across the monument at two separate points, which tells its own story about how the land came to be managed in the centuries after the rath fell out of use.