These circular enclosures, built mostly during the early medieval period as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock, typically show at least a gap in their bank where people and animals passed through. The rath at Cordrehid offers nothing of the sort, its perimeter unbroken as far as the eye can tell.

The site sits towards the base of a south-facing slope on a low drumlin, one of those smooth elongated hills shaped by glacial deposits, and it lies within a broad loop of the River Shannon, which runs somewhere between 230 and 400 metres away on the western, northern, and south-eastern sides. The enclosure is subcircular in shape, roughly 47 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, and is defined by a scarp, essentially a low earthen drop or edge, that ranges from about 25 centimetres high at the southern end to 55 centimetres at the north. On the north-western and northern arc there is also an outer fosse, a shallow ditch with a base width of around four to four and a half metres and a depth of between 20 and 50 centimetres. The whole thing is grass-covered now, blending into the drumlin slope with the kind of understatement that makes these sites easy to walk past without registering what they are.