A rath is a circular or roughly circular enclosure, typically earthen, that served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, and this example in County Mayo is somewhat more elaborate than most. Rather than a simple ring of earth, it presents a subrectangular platform roughly 27 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, surrounded by two fosses, the inner ditch measuring over five metres wide, and an external bank that rises nearly three metres on its outer face at the south. That is a substantial piece of earthwork engineering by any measure.

The site sits on a natural rise in pasture ground, and the builders made deliberate use of the topography: the steep external slope of the bank on the eastern to north-western arc is partly a product of the natural fall of the land, lending the rampart a height and presence that the earthwork alone might not have achieved. A causeway and corresponding ramp still mark the original entrance at the east, crossing the inner fosse and passing through a break in the external bank, though that gap is now partly blocked by loose stones. What complicates the picture is the evidence of later reworking. The inner face of the external bank has been cut vertically and faced almost to its full height with drystone walling of large stones and blocks, and at the north-west to north-east section the bank has been remodelled into a steep external scarp topped with a narrower drystone wall of smaller field stones. Both interventions appear to be relatively recent in origin, suggesting the site was adapted for some agricultural or land management purpose long after its original use had passed. The interior of the platform is level and entirely featureless, offering no surface trace of whatever structures once stood within. Hawthorn bushes now ring the outer bank, the kind of scrubby colonisation that tends to follow wherever earthworks are left undisturbed by the plough.