The ringfort at Friarstown is a rath, the most common monument type in Ireland, built as a defended farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. What distinguishes this one is partly what time has done to it and partly what it looks out over: to the west, the ground drops away into a wide expanse of flat, wet land bordering the lough, a view that would have made the slight elevation of the ridge genuinely useful to whoever first chose to build here.

The enclosure is modest in scale, measuring nineteen metres across from east to west, and is defined by a single earthen bank that varies in width and height as it curves around the circuit. The bank is broader and slightly taller on the north-western side, narrowing toward the south-east, and its internal face retains a stone kerb, suggesting some care was taken in construction even if the overall form is earthen rather than stone-built. A gap of about two and a half metres on the eastern side is likely where the original entrance once stood, oriented, as was common in Irish ringforts, toward the rising sun. A field bank running east to west has since been built up against the outer southern face, folding the ancient enclosure into the ordinary geometry of later agricultural use.

The bank today is heavily colonised by hazel, blackthorn, and brambles, and the northern half of the interior is largely inaccessible beneath a thicket of the same. A post-and-wire fence runs close outside the bank on the eastern and northern sides, with a line of conifers planted along the northern boundary. The vegetation and fencing make the site easier to read from a slight distance than from up close, and the view westward over the wetlands toward Lough Conn gives the best sense of why this particular ridge was chosen in the first place.