Rathdrought takes its prefix from the Irish word "ráth", meaning an earthen ringfort, and sure enough, sitting on a south-facing pasture slope in County Cork, there is one. A roughly circular enclosure, measuring about 31 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west, it survives as a low earthen bank with an external fosse, which is simply a ditch dug around the outside to provide both drainage and a degree of defence. The internal height of the bank still reaches just over a metre in places, enough to give a clear sense of the original boundary even after many centuries of weathering and agricultural activity.

Ringforts of this type were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries and used as enclosed farmsteads by families of modest to middling status. The earthen bank and fosse combination seen here is characteristic of a rath, the simpler end of the ringfort spectrum, as opposed to the more elaborate cashels built from stone. This particular example has not entirely escaped the pressures of later land use: a short section of the bank has been levelled to the south-south-east, and a field boundary now skirts the site along its northern and eastern edges, the kind of incremental encroachment that has altered or erased so many similar monuments across the Irish countryside. That the remainder survives at all, still legible in the pasture, is itself notable.