What makes it quietly awkward is the way modern field boundaries have walked straight through it: one runs north-north-west to south-south-east across the eastern half of the interior, and a second cuts across the north-western edge, truncating the enclosure as though the old boundary simply never registered.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. A rath typically consists of a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and would originally have housed a farmstead, probably dating somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. At Maulnaskeha, the enclosure measures approximately 29.9 metres north-east to south-west and 32.2 metres north-west to south-east, making it a modest but well-preserved example. It is defined by a scarp, essentially a steep slope or cut face in the ground, reaching up to 1.9 metres in height along its northern to western arc, and stone-faced in parts, suggesting that whoever built or maintained it had access to local stone and used it to reinforce the earthwork. That stone facing survives here and there, which is not always the case with earthen raths that have been left to weather under grazing animals for centuries.