The trees were planted along an earthen bank, and their presence is one of the more reliable ways to spot a rath in the Irish countryside, where ringforts have often been absorbed into farmland or reduced to barely legible humps. This one in Subulter retains enough of its original form to be measured and described, but it has not escaped the slow accumulation of agricultural indifference.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically dating from roughly 500 to 1000 AD, built by a farming family as a combination of homestead and status marker. The bank at Subulter survives to about 0.7 metres on its interior face and 1.5 metres on the exterior, with an external fosse, or ditch, running from the south-west around to the north. The fosse is shallow, only about 0.4 metres deep, and to the north-west it holds standing water. The interior, originally the living space of a small household, is now used as a dump for field clearance material and has become overgrown. It is a fate common to many of Ireland's estimated 45,000 surviving ringforts, which are legally protected as archaeological monuments but remain at the mercy of the land uses pressing in around them. The circularity is still visible from outside, and the ring of trees gives it a presence in the landscape that fieldstones or furrows do not.