The one at Kintogher, in County Sligo, sits in low-lying, level wet pasture, which makes it quietly anomalous among its type. A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are generally known, typically consisted of a circular bank of earth or stone surrounding a domestic farmstead, with a ditch, or fosse, dug around the outside to reinforce it. They were built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries and served as the homesteads of farming families across early medieval Ireland. The Kintogher example is modest in scale, roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, with a bank that rises only about a third of a metre above the interior, and a fosse just under five metres wide running around its outer edge. In a drier landscape, these would be unremarkable dimensions. In waterlogged pasture, the choice of this particular spot invites a certain curiosity.

What survives today is considerably less than what was originally constructed. A later field boundary, running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, cuts directly across the eastern side of the site. Where this agricultural bank intersects the rath, the original earthwork has been levelled, and the fosse on that same arc has been removed entirely. A drain, now silted up, was cut along the line of the missing fosse, suggesting that at some point the ditch was considered more useful as a drainage channel than preserved as an ancient boundary. The cumulative effect of these interventions, field reorganisation, drainage works, the quiet logic of working farmland, is that the eastern portion of the rath has been substantially erased. The original entrance has not been identified, which is not unusual where a monument has been altered to this degree, but it does mean that the site offers no obvious starting point for reading its former layout.