The coincidence of boundaries here is telling. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and they frequently ended up fossilised within later field systems, their earthworks reinterpreted over generations as convenient boundaries or wind-breaks rather than as the edges of someone's homestead.

What survives at Guhard is a semi-circular enclosure, the southern half of the original circuit largely lost, with the remainder consisting of an earth and stone bank measuring 1.4 metres in height on both its inner and outer faces and roughly 3 metres wide at the base. The internal diameter runs to 36 metres on a northwest to southeast axis. A fieldbank running northeast to southwest now forms the northeastern boundary of the surviving arc, and a second fieldbank cuts through the western to southeastern sector of the fort, effectively slicing away any surface trace of the enclosure on its southern side. The original entrance, at 5.6 metres wide, faces east, which is a common orientation for raths across Ireland. The site is classified as univallate, meaning it had a single enclosing bank rather than the two or three concentric circuits that higher-status ringforts sometimes display.

The survival of even this partial arc is informative. The way the three townland boundaries of Loughanes, Ballydonoghue and Guhard South converge on the monument suggests the rath was already an established landmark when those administrative divisions were being drawn, old enough and prominent enough to serve as a fixed point in the local geography long after anyone lived within it.