To most eyes it would read as a slight unevenness in a field, a gentle swelling in the ground that cattle graze without ceremony. To anyone who knows what they are looking at, it is the well-preserved outline of a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure found across Ireland, typically built as a farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries.

A rath, or ringfort, was an enclosed living space defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. At Raheenabbeyland the bank stands around 0.8 metres high and the external fosse, the ditch running around the outside, drops to about 0.3 metres deep along its arc from the southeast to the northwest. Three gaps break the southern side of the enclosure, which may indicate original entrances, later breaks, or a combination of both. The site sits on a gentle east-facing slope, a placement that would have been practical for drainage and for catching the morning light, and a second ringfort lies roughly 300 metres to the southwest, suggesting this was once a landscape with more than one household in reasonably close proximity. The survey of the Ballinrobe district compiled by D. Lavelle in 1994 recorded the site as part of a broader effort to document the archaeology of the area around Lough Mask and Lough Carra.