Locals have long called it simply the Ring, and that name appears on a map as far back as 1771, which speaks to a continuity of folk memory that often outlasts any formal record.

A rath is the Irish term for a ringfort, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically circular or near-circular and defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch. This example at Loftushall is subrectangular rather than truly round, roughly 54 metres east to west and 52 metres north to south, its perimeter formed by a grass-covered bank of earth and stone between four and six metres wide. The bank survives to only a modest height, between 0.4 and 0.6 metres, and there is no visible fosse, the ditch that would normally accompany such a bank, nor any clearly defined entrance gap. What makes the site a little harder to read is a grass-covered cairn, about six metres in diameter, sitting in the south-east quadrant of the enclosure. A cairn within a ringfort is unusual; it could represent a much earlier burial feature that was later incorporated into the enclosure, or a later addition, but the notes do not resolve the question. The setting itself adds something to the puzzle: this narrow tongue of the Hook peninsula, hemmed in by the great estuary to the north, is a geographically compressed place, and the choice of such a site for a defended farmstead suggests a community alert to both the waterways and the land routes connecting them.