The surrounding bog would have made this modest elevation far more defensible and visible than its gentle profile suggests today, the grassland on top sitting like a clearing in an otherwise wet and difficult landscape. The rath measures roughly 61 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, making it a substantial enclosure, and its subcircular form, still in fair condition, is defined partly by an earthen bank running from north to east and elsewhere by a scarp, a slope cut into the natural ground to serve as a boundary.

A rath, in Irish archaeological terms, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically associated with early medieval settlement, where a farming family would have lived and kept livestock within a defined and defended space. This one carries several layers of internal complexity that repay close attention. In the north-west quadrant sits a low wedge-shaped platform, nine metres long and rising to about three-quarters of a metre, narrowing from seven metres wide at its southern end to just under five metres at the north. This is interpreted as a possible house foundation, the kind of slight earthwork that might once have supported a timber or wattle structure. A small rectangular hollow at its southern end is locally pointed out as the location of a cave, and the suspicion among archaeologists is that it may mark a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. No surface trace of any such feature is currently visible, however, the hollow being the result of relatively recent digging rather than any surviving original opening. Further low banks running roughly north-west to south-east to the east and south-east of the platform hint at internal subdivisions of the enclosure, the kind of partitioning that would have separated different domestic or agricultural functions within the rath's boundaries.