The rath at Pollacorragune has been cut by paths, swallowed in part by quarrying, and stitched over with field walls, so that reading its original shape now requires a certain patience and a willingness to look past the landscape as it currently presents itself.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks with a ditch, known as a fosse, dug between them. They date broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads for a single household and its livestock. The example at Pollacorragune is subcircular rather than strictly round, measuring approximately 33 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. It was originally defined by two banks with an intervening fosse, a double-banked arrangement that would have signalled a degree of status or security beyond the most basic single-bank enclosure. Portions of that earthwork survive from north to east and from south to west, but elsewhere the monument has not fared well. Quarrying has removed or disturbed the enclosing elements along the western to northern arc, a pathway cuts across the eastern and southern sides, and a field wall has been laid directly over the outer bank between the south-west and west. Each of these intrusions belongs to a different chapter of practical land use, none of them much concerned with what lay beneath.