This is a rath, a type of enclosed settlement built during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, in which a circular bank of earth or stone defined a farmyard and offered a degree of protection for people and livestock. The Rafarn example measures around twenty-six metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size, and fragments of stone-facing survive along its north-western arc, suggesting it was once more substantially built than its current condition implies.

The bank is broken by a gap on its western side, and the interior has been colonised by trees, which both obscures the ground surface and, in an ironic way, has helped preserve whatever lies beneath from modern agricultural disturbance. What makes the site sit a little uneasily in the mind is its proximity to a children's burial ground, recorded roughly two hundred and twenty metres to the south-east. Such sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used from at least the medieval period into the twentieth century for the burial of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Their association with older, pre-Christian monuments is found across Ireland, and the pairing here of a secular settlement enclosure and a marginal burial place gives this otherwise unremarkable corner of east Galway a layered, rather sombre quality that is easy to walk past without noticing.