The northeastern to eastern arc of its enclosing bank was gone by 1897, when the second edition Ordnance Survey map recorded what the 1842 edition had shown as a complete circular enclosure. Whatever cleared that sector, whether agricultural improvement, land hunger, or simple convenience, left the rest alone, and the contrast between the levelled ground to one side and the surviving earthwork to the other makes the loss unusually easy to read.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead within one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one at Larha is a substantial example. Its internal diameter runs to 32 metres north to south, and where the bank survives it is formidable: roughly 0.8 metres wide at the crest, rising some 4 metres above the interior and between 5 and 6.2 metres above the outer ditch. That outer feature, a U-shaped fosse running 2.6 to 3.6 metres wide and about 1.2 metres deep, remains well defined along the surviving arc. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, documented these dimensions and noted the steep exterior face of the bank, a detail that gives a sense of how deliberately defensive, or at least imposing, the original structure would have felt to anyone approaching from outside.