Sitting on a low hillock amid the rolling grassland of Callow in north County Galway, the circular rath has had a field wall built directly on top of its outer bank, so that a later era of farming has effectively consumed part of the earlier structure. On the eastern side, the outer bank has disappeared entirely beneath the ground surface, leaving no visible trace at all. The practical needs of successive generations have, in other words, written themselves directly onto the archaeology.

The site is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches and dating broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries. This particular example is defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them, a double-banked arrangement that may once have indicated the higher status of whoever lived or kept livestock within. The enclosure measures thirty-one metres in diameter. A gap three metres wide at the south-west may be an original entrance, though the centuries of agricultural activity that have reshaped the outer bank make it difficult to read the site with complete confidence.