A rath, as this type of ringfort is known, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period, its enclosing bank defining a family's living space and offering a degree of protection for people and livestock. This one in Leaffony measures roughly 25 metres across, enclosed by an earthen bank some 4.2 metres wide. What makes it worth a second look is how much of its original logic survives, even in degraded form.

The bank stands to an internal height of around 0.7 metres and an external height of 1.5 metres, the difference reflecting the way material was thrown inward from a surrounding ditch during construction. That ditch, known as a fosse, has largely disappeared here, but a substantial field bank running along the south-west side, just 3 metres out from the rath, follows the same curve with a fidelity that seems unlikely to be coincidental. It may represent the last visible trace of that original fosse and outer bank, absorbed over the centuries into the working field system around it. Elsewhere the monument shows the ordinary pressures of agricultural use: the bank has been levelled along its north-east to east arc, and to the north its outer face has been folded into a modern field boundary, the ancient earthwork quietly repurposed as a convenient property line.