The southern half of the enclosure has been deliberately built up, compensating for the natural slope of the south-facing terrace on which it sits, so that the interior would have been reasonably level for whoever lived or worked within it. That kind of considered groundwork, carried out without machinery or written plans, gives a different texture to what might otherwise read as a simple earthen circle in a field.

A rath, to use the Irish term, is a type of ringfort enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and was typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Scurmore example is a circular area roughly 32 metres in diameter, surrounded by a bank that measures between 4.9 and 5.5 metres wide. The bank stands about 0.8 to 1.4 metres above the interior ground level on the inside, and rises to around 2 metres on the exterior at its southern side, where the raised fill is most pronounced. A gap of approximately 2 metres in the bank at the east-south-east may mark the original entrance, the point through which people, animals, and goods would once have passed. The site sits close to the base of a low ridge running north-west to south-east, a position that would have offered some shelter and a useful outlook across the sloping ground to the south.

One additional detail gives the site a slightly different quality: another rath lies roughly 60 metres to the north-north-west. The proximity of two such enclosures suggests this small area of Sligo may have supported more than one early medieval household in relatively close company, which was not unusual in a landscape where such farmsteads were once numerous enough to number in the tens of thousands across Ireland.