It measures roughly five metres across from east to west and four metres north to south, dimensions that suggest a domestic structure rather than a defensive one. In places, a revetment of stone is still visible within the bank, the facing-stones that would have held the earthwork together, and there is what appears to be an entrance gap on the eastern side.

Structures of this kind are generally interpreted as hut sites, the modest remains of early medieval or prehistoric habitation, where a family or small group would have built a dwelling within a low enclosing bank. The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled during the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland and an invaluable record of local knowledge at the time, noted the presence of two small raths in this townland. A rath, broadly speaking, is a ringfort, a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, most commonly associated with early medieval farming settlement in Ireland. The Name Books entry leaves open the question of whether the features recorded were true raths or something smaller and less formal, perhaps simple enclosures or hut sites of the kind that survives here. That ambiguity has not been resolved, which makes Rathbane a mildly puzzling entry in the county's archaeological record, a site that sits at the edge of several categories without quite belonging to any one of them.