A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, was already fully intact when the Ordnance Survey mapped it that year, showing a neat circular enclosure approximately 36 metres across from east to west. Sometime after that survey, the northern quarter of the site was cut away, reduced to little more than a sloping edge in the ground. The rest has survived, sitting on the western face of a low natural ridge in gently rolling grassland, its earthen bank and shallow external fosse, the ditch running around the outside, still curving from the north-east around to the south and west.

The choice of location is typical of how these enclosures were sited across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. A slight elevation offered both drainage and visibility, and this one commands extensive views in every direction, practical advantages that would have mattered as much to a farming household a thousand years ago as to anyone standing there now. The interior today is level and without obvious features, though the ground outside to the north-west carries faint traces of cultivation ridges running north-east to south-west, the corrugated signatures of old lazy-bed or ridge-and-furrow farming that may post-date the rath itself or may reflect the continued agricultural use of land around it across several centuries. The townland boundary with Paddinstown Upper runs along a field fence just 50 metres to the south, a small reminder that these old earthworks have long served as convenient landmarks for later administrative divisions of the land.