What catches the eye first is the contrast: from inside the enclosure, the surrounding bank rises only about sixty centimetres, barely enough to notice, yet looking at it from outside, the same bank climbs to two metres, the ground having been scooped away to form the outer ditch. That asymmetry is the whole point. The ringfort, or rath, was designed to present a formidable face to the world while keeping its interior relatively open and domestic in feel.

A rath is an early medieval farmstead, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, formed by throwing up a circular earthen bank and digging a ditch, or fosse, around a farmstead to enclose livestock and signal the status of the family within. This example at Mundellihy has a diameter of twenty-nine metres, with an external fosse that runs from west-southwest to east-southeast, still measuring around eighty centimetres deep and three metres wide, which is a reasonable state of preservation for something that has been sitting in agricultural land for more than a thousand years. What makes this site slightly unusual is the addition of a rectangular annex on its southern side, roughly thirty metres east to west and ten metres north to south, bounded by existing field boundaries on three sides and by the main enclosure bank on the north. Such annexes are thought to have served as animal pens or additional working enclosures, and their presence suggests a site that was actively managed and economically productive rather than purely defensive. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The site lies in ordinary farmland, so access would depend on landowner permission, as is common with field monuments of this kind across Ireland. The interior is partially covered by mature trees, which means that even in summer the enclosure retains a certain damp, shaded quality that makes the earthworks easier to read than those that have been entirely claimed by open pasture. Looking south from the bank, the rectangular annex is most legible in low light, particularly in winter or early spring when grass is shorter and shadow picks out the slight changes in ground level that mark its boundaries.