The ringfort, roughly sixty metres in diameter, is ringed by trees along its perimeter, with scrub filling the interior, and its raised, circular profile gives it the moat-like appearance that has drawn comment for over a century. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed settlements typically built during the early medieval period, their earthen banks serving as boundaries for farmsteads and livestock rather than purely military fortifications. This one is substantial by any measure.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan described the site as "a very fine moat-shaped rath, probably the 'Black Rath' from which the church was formerly named." That detail quietly reorders the relationship between the two monuments across the road. The medieval church did not lend its name to the rath; if Carrigan was right, it was the other way around. The rath came first, and the church inherited something of its identity, including, apparently, a colour. What "Black Rath" referred to in practice, whether a visual quality, a local association, or something else entirely, is not recorded. The name itself has since faded, surviving only in Carrigan's volume and in the older ecclesiastical records he was drawing upon.

The monument has not escaped the pressures of modern settlement. The south-western and western sectors of the bank have been encroached upon by gardens attached to houses nearby, a common fate for earthworks that sit close to village edges. The rest of the structure remains, trees marking its curve against the sky, with the road and the churchyard just across the way providing an unusually compact pairing of early and later medieval archaeology within a very small area.