A rath, in the Irish tradition, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically dating to the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or dwelling enclosure. This one is univallate, meaning it had a single such enclosing element rather than the two or three concentric rings found at more elaborate sites. What stands today, however, is something more ambiguous: a perimeter that reaches up to 1.3 metres in height in places but shifts character as you move around it, earthen bank giving way to drystone walling, then to stone-revetted earthen bank, then back again, with an outline that is now irregular rather than the neat circle the original builders would have intended.

Jane Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, one of the more thorough regional surveys carried out in Ireland during that period, documented the site and offered a working interpretation of its evolution. The original enclosure appears to have been an earthen bank, possibly faced with stone on its outer side, a common enough technique for adding structural stability to what was essentially compacted soil. The drystone sections are considered secondary, added later, perhaps when the bank began to erode or when the land changed hands and use. A laneway that now runs along the western side of the site has further complicated the picture: that portion of the enclosing bank has either been cleared away to accommodate the track or quietly absorbed into the lane's own boundary fencing, making it impossible to say with certainty where the rath ends and the lane begins. Inside the enclosure, a large mound of field clearance material sits in the interior, the accumulated result of generations of farmers removing stones from surrounding ground, which itself tells a story about continuous agricultural use of the landscape around a monument that was never quite abandoned, even as it was steadily reworked.