The Douglas river drops away some ten metres below, and the rath, a type of early medieval enclosed farmstead typically formed by an earthen bank and surrounding ditch, occupies the very lip of that descent. It is not the sort of location one associates with comfortable habitation, and that tension between the site's domestic origins and its precipitous setting is what makes it worth pausing over.

The structure itself is modest in scale. A circular raised platform with a flat top, roughly eleven metres across and rising about one and a half metres, is defined on its north-western to south-western arc by a U-shaped fosse, the ditch that would have complemented an earthen bank as a boundary and modest defensive feature. On the western side, a berm, a level strip of ground left between the inner edge of the fosse and the main platform, runs approximately three metres wide. The eastern side of the circuit, where the steep riverbank itself falls away dramatically, requires no artificial ditch; the topography does the work instead. No entrance has been identified, and nothing survives above ground to indicate what once stood inside, though the interior of a rath would typically have sheltered a house and ancillary farm buildings. The deliberate use of the riverbank as a natural barrier on one flank is a practical choice, but it also gives the site an unusually exposed, almost theatrical quality when seen from below.