This is a rath, one of the tens of thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead, defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch. At Lickeen, both have been so thoroughly worn down that only a faint scarp and a shallow fosse remain, the ditch measuring between two and two and a half metres wide and barely half a metre deep in places. The site is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 31 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, and it sits on a north-north-east-facing slope looking out across a landscape scattered with the traces of older occupation: boreens, ruined structures, and the corrugated ridges of lazy-beds, the narrow cultivation strips associated with pre-Famine farming.

The rath was already being recorded when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, where it appears marked with hachures, the short lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen mound or enclosure. By the 1916 edition, only part of the feature was still hachured, suggesting the earthworks were continuing to degrade even then. By 1996, when it was entered into the Record of Monuments and Places, the site had been reclassified simply as an enclosure, a cautious designation that reflects how little of its original form survives. The eastern portion of the scarp has been removed entirely, and in the north-east it has been lowered to field level; a gap of roughly six metres here may mark the original entrance. The interior slopes northward and is thick with reeds, though lazy-beds are still visible in the western quadrant. Modern field boundaries running along the east and south sides of the site create the misleading appearance of an outer bank where none exists.