Sitting just below a break in slope where a level plateau gives way to lower valley ground, this rath occupies the kind of position that early medieval farmers favoured: elevated enough to survey the surrounding grassland, sheltered enough to be practical. A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically dating from the early medieval period, and would originally have enclosed a farmstead or small settlement within its banked and ditched perimeter. Here, the defining feature is a fosse, the encircling ditch, which survives at roughly three and a half metres wide and between forty and fifty centimetres deep, tracing a circle of about thirty metres in diameter.

When the site was inspected in 1987, much of the interior had been quarried away. Quarrying of this kind was not unusual across Ireland, where ringforts were sometimes mined for stone or gravel, or simply levelled to make fields more workable. The result at Rathpatrick is a monument that reads more clearly from its outer ditch than from anything within. The fosse still describes the original shape of the enclosure, but the interior that would have contained traces of daily life, post-holes, hearths, animal pens, is largely gone.