The ground gives nothing away. There is no earthwork, no bank, no ditch, only grass over what was once a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres across.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are generally called, would originally have consisted of one or more raised banks of earth, sometimes with an outer ditch, enclosing a domestic space. They were built throughout Ireland primarily during the early medieval period, and thousands survive in varying states of preservation. This one at Maglin was still visible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure, the fine radiating lines used by cartographers of that era to suggest an earthen rise or rim. At some point between that survey and the present, it was levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement of the kind that cleared countless similar features from the Irish landscape over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 1842 map is now the most reliable witness to its shape and scale.