The curious thing about this ring barrow is how deliberately placed it appears, positioned precisely between two valleys running northwest to southeast, as though whoever built it wanted to be seen from as far as possible, or wanted to see everything around them.

A ring barrow is a prehistoric funerary monument, typically Bronze Age in origin, consisting of a burial mound or platform enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. The example at Rathealy follows this form closely. The flat circular platform measures up to 22 metres in diameter. Around it runs a waterlogged fosse roughly 2.5 metres wide and about half a metre deep, and beyond that an undulating earthen bank that still stands nearly 1.75 metres on its interior face and around a metre on the exterior. A causewayed entrance, that is, a deliberately left gap in the ditch to allow passage across it, opens to the south at a width of approximately 5 metres. That the bank is described as undulating rather than smooth or uniform suggests the centuries have not been entirely gentle with it, yet the overall form survives well enough to read clearly in the landscape.