The rath at Gorteennaskagh is easy to miss precisely because it sits in such unremarkable surroundings, yet it preserves, with reasonable clarity, the essential geometry of early medieval rural life: a roughly oval enclosure, a defined edge, a shallow surrounding ditch, all still legible in the grass after more than a thousand years of farming around and over them.

Ringforts, known variously as raths or lios depending on their construction, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were not military fortifications in any serious sense but rather enclosed farmyards, the raised banks and ditches serving to keep livestock in and wolves or opportunistic raiders out. The Gorteennaskagh example is modest in scale: the interior measures approximately 19.7 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and 16 metres north to south. It is defined by a scarped edge, meaning the ground has been deliberately cut and shaped, producing a bank roughly 5.9 metres wide and 0.9 metres high. An external fosse, the formal term for a ditch, runs around the northwestern to western arc, measuring about 2.4 metres across, though it is now very shallow at roughly 0.1 metres deep. The interior itself slopes gently downward toward the west. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in July 2013.

The site sits in private farmland, so access would require landowner permission. Because the earthworks are low and the surrounding ground is flat, the best time to look is on a winter afternoon when low-angle light rakes across the pasture and reveals subtle changes in elevation that summer grass would otherwise conceal. What to look for is less a dramatic mound than a quiet irregularity in the field surface, a slight rise and then a faint depression curving around its western side, the ghost of a ditch that once mattered quite a lot to whoever lived inside it.