A rath, as this type of enclosure is also known, was typically a circular earthwork of raised banks and ditches enclosing a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Here in Moneen, the circular form still holds, measuring roughly thirty metres north to south and twenty-four metres east to west, but the defining feature has been absorbed so thoroughly into the agricultural landscape that the bankwork now forms part of a stone-faced field boundary, overgrown and folded into the ordinary geometry of the pasture.

The site was recorded on the 1934 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an arc of hachures, the small hatched marks surveyors used to indicate a scarp or slope, running from southwest to northeast and extending outward from a kink in the field boundary to the south. That kink is itself telling: it is the kind of deviation a field boundary makes when it has been built around something older rather than through it. The surviving scarp reaches only about 0.3 metres in height, which gives a sense of how much the original earthwork has been reduced over centuries of farming. Roughly fifty metres to the west lies a multiple cist cairn, a burial monument in which stone-lined graves, or cists, are grouped together, suggesting that this corner of Moneen carried some significance across more than one period of prehistory and early history.