A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, formed by one or more earthen banks with an internal ditch, and used as a farmstead or defended homestead in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What survives here is modest: a circular area measuring approximately 26 metres east to west, its perimeter marked by the faint traces of a low bank and a scarp rather than any dramatic rampart. The bank itself is only a few centimetres high externally, its interior edge barely more pronounced, and much of what once defined the enclosure has been softened by centuries of grazing pasture.

The name of the place is where things get interesting. When Ordnance Survey workers were gathering local place-name information in the 1840s, they recorded that this rath derived its name from an old condemned road that lay within two chains of it on the eastern side. A chain is an old surveying unit of roughly twenty metres, so the road in question ran very close indeed. The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the enclosure as a circular feature of around 30 metres in diameter, sitting alongside a north-west to south-east road at its north-east. By the time the 1894 revision was made, the road had done its quiet damage: the rath is shown truncated at the north-east, the enclosure cut into by that same route. The word condemned, applied to a road in the mid-nineteenth century, most likely refers to a routeway officially closed or abandoned, perhaps under road improvement schemes common in the decades before and after the Famine. A second rath lies approximately 180 metres to the west, suggesting this part of the ridge was, at some earlier period, a place where people chose to settle in some number.