Somewhere on the flat, wind-scoured expanse of the Curragh, an early medieval ringfort sits with a pair of Second World War concrete pill-boxes embedded within it. The juxtaposition is quietly jarring: a monument that was already ancient when the Normans arrived, now sharing its footprint with the low, blunt defensive structures of a mid-twentieth century Irish Army. That combination makes this particular enclosure one of the more peculiar layerings of military history in the Irish midlands.

A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, generally understood to have served as a farmstead or settlement, defined by an earthen bank and a surrounding ditch. Walsh's Rath follows that pattern closely. It sits on a slight rise in the ground and consists of a circular interior area of around 28 metres in diameter, enclosed by a fosse (a flat-bottomed or V-shaped ditch) and an external bank, giving the whole monument an overall diameter of approximately 42 metres. An original entrance opens to the east. The site was documented by Seán P. O'Riordáin in 1950, and even at that point the insertion of two military pill-boxes had already disturbed the fabric of the monument. The Curragh, as the permanent home of the Irish Defence Forces and a long-established military plain, has seen successive generations of soldiers train and camp across ground that was settled and farmed more than a thousand years before any modern army existed.

The Curragh's wide, open grassland is a designated plain of particular ecological and historical significance in Co. Kildare, and the rath sits within that landscape as a reminder that the plain's long use by military forces is only its most recent chapter. The pill-boxes, far from erasing the earlier monument, have in an odd way helped preserve the outline of the rath by anchoring attention to the site.