The rises are subtle enough that a casual walker might cross them without a second thought, yet they describe, quite precisely, the earthwork remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most numerous type of monument in the Irish landscape.

A rath was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. The Loughane example is modest in scale. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Cork in 1842, their six-inch sheet recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around thirty metres, those short radiating lines being the cartographic convention for showing an earthen rise. On the ground today, the surviving earthwork is somewhat smaller, a circular area of about nineteen and a half metres across, shaped by two low rings of raised ground with a shallow depression running between them. A possible entrance opens to the west-northwest, the favoured orientation for many such enclosures, though the reasoning behind that preference is still debated. The gap between what the 1842 map recorded and what is now measurable on the surface hints at the slow, incremental erosion that centuries of agricultural use bring to earthworks of this kind.