A rath, as this type of early medieval enclosed farmstead is commonly known, would once have consisted of one or more earthen banks encircling a domestic settlement. This one, on a gentle rise in undulating grassland at Ballinrooaun, has been ploughed flat over years of agricultural use, leaving nothing for the eye to read at ground level, at least not obviously.

When surveyors visited in April 1985, they found the enclosure's outline preserved in an unexpected way: a band of lighter soil tracing the circuit where the old earthwork had stood. The disturbed and compacted material of a demolished bank, it seems, weathers differently from the surrounding ground, and that difference shows up in the soil's colour and texture long after the structure itself is gone. The outline measured roughly 33.5 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, making it a modest but not unusual size for a rath of this kind. The 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map had already recorded it as a subcircular enclosure, though even then a field boundary cut across it from the north-west through to the south-east, suggesting the site had been under pressure for some time.

The site is also legible from above. Aerial photography has captured the cropmark or soilmark left by the vanished earthwork, the kind of ghostly impression that makes a ploughed-out monument suddenly coherent again when seen from altitude. It is a reminder that Irish fields contain far more archaeology than their tidy surfaces suggest.