The site sits on a north-north-west-facing slope in County Cork, and rather than seek level ground, whoever constructed this enclosure simply engineered around the incline: the interior has been cut back into the hillside on the south-south-east side and built up on the opposite side to create a usable, roughly flat living space. The result is a circular enclosure measuring just under twenty-nine metres across, enclosed by an earthen bank standing two metres high, with traces of stone facing still visible along parts of its outer face.

A rath, as this type of monument is classified, is an earthwork enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and most likely served as a defended farmstead for a single family or small community. At Lackareagh, the entrance gap in the bank to the north is only about one and a half metres wide, flanked by low ridges that would have guided and funnelled anyone approaching. Just beyond that threshold, a cairn of field clearance stones has accumulated outside the entrance, the kind of incidental accumulation that speaks to generations of agricultural use long after the original occupants were gone. A shallow fosse, or external ditch, survives to the east of the bank, and a stone-faced field boundary running concentric with the enclosure sits about eight metres out to the south-west and north-west, suggesting the organised management of land immediately around the fort. Inside, faint cultivation ridges running on a north-south axis cross the interior, a reminder that this ground was worked as field strips at some point, though whether that was contemporary with the rath or considerably later is not clear from what remains visible at the surface.