The example at Inishkenny in County Cork is modest by any measure, but its proportions are precisely recorded: a roughly circular raised platform, about 51.8 metres north to south and 43.9 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank whose inner face rises just over a metre and whose outer face stands nearly two metres tall. That difference in height is characteristic of how these banks were built, the spoil from an outer ditch heaped inward to create a more imposing barrier from outside than from within.

A rath, as this class of monument is sometimes called, is simply an earthen ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth century. Farmers and their families lived inside, their livestock brought in at night, the bank and ditch serving as much as a social marker of status as a defensive wall. The Inishkenny example sits on a north-facing slope in pasture, which is one reason it has survived; land that remained under grass rather than being ploughed tends to preserve earthworks. Its entrance, 3.5 metres wide, faces north-north-west, a detail that is unremarkable in itself but useful to anyone trying to locate the break in the bank from a distance. The interior would once have held timber or wattle structures, none of which survive above ground, leaving the earthworks themselves as the only legible record of whoever farmed this hillside more than a thousand years ago.