The site at Mundellihy sits in ordinary pasture on a gentle south-facing slope, and from a distance there is little to distinguish it from a slight irregularity in the field. Only when you pick out the curve of the enclosing bank does the underlying geometry become clear: a roughly circular area about 29 metres across, ringed by an earthen bank and a shallow external ditch.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Raths, sometimes called ringforts, were typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries and served as enclosed farmsteads for single family groups, the bank and ditch providing a modest barrier against livestock straying and perhaps a degree of social definition as much as serious defence. The Mundellihy example is relatively modest in scale. The bank rises only about 35 centimetres above the interior ground level but stands roughly a metre and a half above the outer base, giving a reasonable sense of the original effort involved in throwing up the earthwork. The external fosse, the ditch cut around the outside of the bank, is recorded at around 75 centimetres deep and nearly two metres wide. Two gaps in the bank, one to the north-north-west and one to the east-north-east, each around two metres wide, likely mark former entrances, though it is difficult to say with certainty how much later use or land management may have shaped them. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

On the ground today the site is substantially obscured. Scrub overgrowth has colonised the bank itself, while the interior carries tall grasses and marsh vegetation, suggesting poor drainage in the low-lying centre. The northern to north-western arc of the enclosing element is the hardest to read, partly because the farm building has encroached on the outer edge of the fosse at that point. A visitor approaching from the south would have the clearest view of the bank profile, where the height differential between interior and exterior is most legible. Late autumn or winter, when vegetation dies back, offers better prospects for tracing the circuit of the bank through the scrub.