What makes it worth a second look is not its size but its detail. The surrounding earthen bank still stands to a height of 2.1 metres, and cut into its inner face are two stone-lined semi-circles, one to the south and one to the north-north-west, whose exact purpose remains unclear. Beneath the treeline that now fills the interior, there may also be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or both.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one at Roughgrove carries a few details that lift it above the generic. The fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have run outside the bank, is now largely silted up along its north-north-east to east arc. More unusually, a pathway runs through a widened section of that fosse, skirting the bank from the south-west around to the north-north-east, and this sunken route sits some 2.2 metres below the level of the surrounding field to the north. Whether that hollow way is ancient or the result of later agricultural use working along a convenient low corridor is not recorded, but the depth of it suggests long and repeated use.