The ground barely rises; the earthen bank that once enclosed this ringfort climbs only about sixty centimetres at its highest point, and across much of its circuit it has been levelled almost entirely into the surrounding marsh. Yet the place name itself, Rathea, carries the Irish word rath, the term for an enclosed earthen ringfort of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. That the landscape should have forgotten the monument while the name quietly preserved it is one of those small ironies that Irish townland geography keeps producing.

The enclosure is sub-circular in plan, measuring about thirty-one metres across its east-west diameter. What makes it particularly interesting, at least to those who study such things, is that it may originally have been bivallate, meaning it was defended not by a single enclosing bank and ditch but by two concentric rings of earthworks. A bivallate rath would have signalled something about the status or resources of whoever occupied it; single-bank enclosures are far more common, and a second ring of defence implied additional effort and perhaps additional prestige. The outer bank now survives only as a short stretch to the east, roughly the same width as the inner bank at around 4.9 metres, with an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running alongside it at 1.2 metres wide. The rest has gone, absorbed into the boggy field. The enclosure does not appear on the Ordnance Survey maps made in 1841 to 1842, though it had been recorded by the time of the 1914 to 1915 edition, suggesting it was either overlooked in the earlier survey or had become recognisable again in the intervening decades. C. Toal documented it in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, where it appears as entry number 652.