What makes it quietly compelling is how much it has absorbed over the centuries without quite losing its original shape. Field boundaries cut across its interior, a house site occupies its north-western quadrant, and modern fencing divides off its southern section, yet the enclosing bank of earth and large stones, standing around a metre high on the interior face, still describes a space some 56 metres across. Somewhere beneath the western quadrant, surveyors in 1983 identified a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Other interior ridges were noted too, though they formed no definite pattern.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the standard farmstead type of early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family's dwelling and outbuildings within a raised bank, often with an external ditch. This particular example appears to have had no external ditch, which is worth noting since the ditch was usually an integral part of the defensive or boundary arrangement. The site has accumulated several identities across the historical record. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, it was recorded as an oval-shaped enclosure; by the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, it had been re-described as a D-shaped earthwork, its interior already being parcelled up by field boundaries. Earlier still, an estate map of Rathconrath dating from 1776, now held in the National Library of Ireland, depicts a circular earthwork in this vicinity annotated with the name Rathcloghey, a name that seems to have quietly slipped out of common use since. About 175 metres to the east, a barrow, a prehistoric burial mound, sits in the same landscape, suggesting that this shoulder of hill was considered a significant place across more than one era.