A rath, or ringfort, was the standard enclosed settlement of rural Ireland during the early medieval period, typically a circular area ringed by one or more earthen banks, used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing. This one is a decent example of the form, enclosing an interior roughly 38 metres across, its bank still standing between 1.2 and 2.5 metres high and running some 6 metres wide. Traces of an external fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the outside of the bank, remain visible at the northern and southern sides.

When Ordnance Survey cartographers mapped this part of Kilkenny in 1839, they recorded the enclosure as a clearly oval shape, roughly 55 metres north to south and 44 metres east to west. By the time the map was revised in 1900 to 1901, the outline had taken on a more irregular appearance, suggesting the intervening decades of agricultural use had begun to soften and distort the edges. The interior today is heavily overgrown with scrub and scattered trees, which both obscures the archaeology and, in a practical sense, protects it from further disturbance.