What makes it quietly curious is not just its age but the fact that a later field boundary has been built directly over part of the outer bank, running from the north-west around to the north, meaning successive generations of farmers have used this ancient boundary as a convenient wall, layering their own agricultural logic on top of an Early Medieval one.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish countryside, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks with external ditches, or fosses, used as a defended farmstead during the Early Medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. This example at Ballynagittagh is a more substantial version, having two banks separated by a fosse, a form sometimes associated with higher-status occupation. A gap on the northern side may be the original entrance, which, if so, would have been the point through which livestock were driven in and out under the protection of the enclosure. Recorded in a local survey by O'Flanagan as early as 1927, the site also contains within its interior a cashel-type feature, a stone-built enclosure nested inside the earthwork, a detail that adds another layer of complexity to what might otherwise seem like a simple grass-covered mound.