This is a rath, a type of circular or subcircular earthwork enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, typically constructed as a defended farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Tiravray example is modest in scale, measuring approximately 34 metres north to south and 28.5 metres east to west, but its elevated position on the drumlin spine would have made it a commanding presence in its day.

The enclosure is defined by an earthen bank, now largely reduced to a scarp on its eastern side, with traces of a silted fosse, the shallow ditch that originally ran outside the bank and provided the material for its construction. Two entrances survive: one to the north, roughly two metres wide at the top, and a broader one to the east at around four and a half metres. The site was recorded on McCrea's map of County Monaghan in 1793, which places it among the documented landscape features of the county well before the era of systematic ordnance surveying, and it appears on all subsequent editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps. That continuity of cartographic record suggests the earthwork remained visible and recognisable across two centuries of agricultural change in the area, even as the bank eroded and the interior became overgrown.