What makes it worth a second look is precisely how little it announces itself. There is no visible entrance, the enclosing bank rises barely half a metre on the interior, and a stretch of the surrounding ditch has given way entirely to a band of rushes, the kind of detail that tells you more about the passage of time than any upstanding wall could.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisting of a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were used as farmsteads, most often between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Rover example measures twenty-eight metres in diameter, with its most substantial surviving bank on the southern side, where the external face stands about 1.6 metres high. Elsewhere, the enclosure is defined by a scarp, a cut or slope in the ground rather than a built-up bank, reaching 1.2 metres at the eastern edge closest to the stream. A fosse, or outer ditch, is traceable from the north-west around to the north-east, though a later field bank cutting across the west to north-west side has broken into it, and to the south the ditch survives only as the band of rushes that tends to colonise waterlogged ground. Field spoil has been dumped along the southern perimeter at some point, which has further softened what was once a more defined boundary.

The site occupies a terrace position that would have made practical sense for an early farmer: sheltered by the mountain behind, with the Arigna stream running roughly north to south about 150 metres to the east. The rushes marking the old ditch line and the encroaching field bank are worth looking for when approaching the site, since they give a clearer sense of the original extent of the enclosure than the earthwork itself does from a distance.