When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of mid Cork in 1842, their draughtsmen recorded not only the familiar hachured circle of a rath, but a limekiln pressed against its outer bank. A limekiln is a stone furnace used to burn limestone into quicklime for agricultural use, and the fact that a farmer chose to construct one directly against an ancient earthwork says something about how these sites were treated in the nineteenth century: less as monuments than as convenient ready-made walls.

The rath itself sits in level pasture on the southern edge of the Grenagh settlement in Co. Cork. It measures roughly 39.7 metres north to south and 37.7 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical example of the enclosed farmsteads that early medieval farming families built across Ireland between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosing bank survives to an internal height of about 1.3 metres along the south-south-west to north-north-east arc, with a scarp of around half a metre continuing east to south-south-west. A shallow external fosse, the ditch dug to create the bank's material, runs outside the western side. By 1904 and again in 1938, later survey maps were still recording the line of the bank, though farm buildings had by then begun to encroach along the north-east. The site also has a former near-neighbour: a standing stone once marked the ground just outside the southern bank, though it is recorded separately and its current condition is unclear.