A rath is an earthen ringfort, a form of enclosed settlement built throughout Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, typically to protect a farming household and its livestock. This one measures thirty-nine metres across its north-to-south axis, encircled by an earthen bank that still stands to a height of one and a half metres, with a shallow fosse, or ditch, running along its outer edge. The fosse would originally have provided the material dug out to raise the bank, and together the two features formed a boundary that was as much a statement of status as a practical defence.

The fact that the site survives at all within cultivated ground is quietly remarkable. Ringforts across Ireland have been lost in their thousands to agricultural improvement, particularly during the intensification of tillage farming in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At Tead More, the bank has clearly been reduced and the fosse is described as shallow, suggesting the surrounding ploughing has taken some toll over the generations, yet the essential form endures. No specific historical occupant is recorded, which is typical; the vast majority of raths were the homes of ordinary farming families whose names went unwritten, leaving only the earthwork itself as evidence of a life once organised around this particular patch of Cork hillside.