The structure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead or the home of a local chieftain within a raised earthen ring. This one has seen better days, and it makes no particular effort to impress: the bank is visible all the way round, but gaps have opened up at the north-west and north-east, and the interior is now colonised by pine trees from the plantation that envelops it.

The rath measures roughly 42 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south, giving it a slightly elongated oval footprint rather than the more commonly depicted circular form. Its setting within the former demesne grounds is telling in itself. Country estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently absorbed prehistoric features into their landscapes, sometimes deliberately as picturesque curiosities, sometimes simply by enclosing land that already contained them. Rinville Demesne did both, effectively folding this ancient enclosure into its plantation without erasing it. References to the site appear in sources from 1914 and 1952, by which point its condition was already described as poor, suggesting that whatever original height and definition the bank once had was already well diminished by the early twentieth century.

The pine interior gives the site an oddly hushed quality that a cleared enclosure would not have. Where a visitor might expect open ground, there is instead a ring of trees growing within what would once have been a domestic space, their trunks standing inside an earthwork that may have sheltered timber buildings, livestock, and everyday early medieval life. The contrast between the archaeological form and the plantation overlay is, in its quiet way, the most interesting thing about it.