A rath is a ringfort, the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval Irish landowner, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across Ireland, but most visitors walk past them without realising the lumps and ridges in the grass were once someone's home and farmyard.

The enclosure here is oval, measuring roughly 26 metres north to south and 32.5 metres east to west. What makes the earthwork interesting is the way it works with its landscape rather than simply sitting on top of it. Along the north-east to north-west arc, a constructed bank rises to about 2.2 metres on its outer face, though only 0.36 metres on the interior, suggesting the natural slope of the hillock was already doing much of the defensive work. To the north, a scarp, essentially a steep natural or cut slope, drops 1.7 metres, reinforcing the enclosure without the need for additional building. At the south-east there is only a faint trace of an external fosse, the ditch that would typically have been dug to amplify the bank beyond it, its width estimated at around four metres. Whether it was never fully dug, or has simply silted and softened over the centuries, is not recorded. The entrance, 4.3 metres wide, faces south-west, an orientation common in Irish ringforts and thought by some researchers to relate to prevailing winds and practical farming routines rather than any ritual preference.