The rath at Ceann Eich takes a different approach entirely, sitting in low-lying boggy pasture on the Iveragh Peninsula, looking out over the estuary of the Inny river and across towards Ballinskelligs Bay to the south-west. It is not a place chosen for elevation or drama, and the landscape has not been kind to it.

A bivallate rath is a ringfort enclosed by two concentric earthen banks, each separated by a fosse, the term for the ditch dug to create the bank material and reinforce the barrier. At Ceann Eich, both circuits survive only in a badly eroded state. The outer bank has all but vanished on the northern side; where it does persist along the south, it stands just half a metre above the external ground level and about 0.8 metres above the base of a fosse that is now waterlogged. The inner bank fares slightly better, traceable for most of its circuit, though it too is low and worn, rising no more than a metre above the base of the fosse. The interior of the enclosure measures roughly 24 metres north to south and just under 26 metres east to west. The one element that retains some definition is the entrance, located on the southern side, 1.25 metres wide and lined with drystone masonry, now considerably collapsed, with the remains of a causeway crossing the fosse just in front of it. The flooding that periodically covers the surrounding land has clearly been working at this structure for a very long time, and the waterlogged fosse suggests the problem is not new.

The site is wet, poorly drained, and offers little to the casual eye beyond low, grass-covered humps in a boggy field. What makes it quietly interesting is precisely that combination of factors: a settlement form that was typically associated with local landowners or farmers of modest status in early medieval Ireland, planted in ground that seems to work against the very purpose of its enclosing earthworks. Whether it was always this marginal, or whether the landscape around the Inny estuary has changed significantly since the rath was built, is a question the eroded banks cannot easily answer.