What gives this particular example its quiet oddity is the way the surrounding landscape has grown around and into it: the bank on its south-western side has been absorbed into a field fence, its outer face reinforced with stone by farmers who found it more practical to incorporate an ancient boundary than to remove one. The interior, meanwhile, carries the faint corrugated trace of old cultivation ridges running on a north-north-west to south-south-east axis, evidence that the enclosed space was at some point turned over to tillage rather than left as the domestic yard it once would have been.

A rath is an earthen ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside, typically dating to the early medieval period between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. Most were farmsteads, the enclosing bank and ditch providing a degree of security for a family and their livestock rather than any serious military fortification. This one at Gortloughra measures 31.5 metres across in both directions, making it a fairly standard single-enclosure example. The enclosing bank still stands to an internal height of 1.4 metres on much of its circuit, rising to a scarp of 1.8 metres on the western side. An external fosse, the ditch dug to provide the material for the bank, survives to a depth of 0.4 metres on the eastern and south-south-western arc, though the equivalent feature to the west has silted up almost entirely. A gap of around 1.5 metres in the bank on the eastern side most likely marks the original entrance, orientated, as was common practice, towards the rising sun.