The land has, in effect, been parcelled around it, the living farm absorbed into the geometry of early medieval life and then partly dismantled by it. That tension between the old earthwork and the working landscape it sits within is one of the quietly telling things about this site.

The monument is a ringfort, the most common type of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank with an internal ditch, or fosse, used as a farmstead or high-status residence from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. At Raheennagun, the internal diameter measures approximately 42 metres, and the external fosse is unusually wide, ranging from seven to ten metres across. The site appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839 to 1840, and again on the 1945 to 1946 revision, each time recorded as a circular enclosure. By 1969, however, the archaeologist O'Kelly was already describing it as a partly-demolished rath, the Irish word for an earthen ringfort, suggesting the structure had suffered some degradation well before the mid-twentieth century.

Today, the interior is grassed over, with trees and scrub beginning to encroach. The earthwork endures, but only just, held in place partly by the administrative accident of a townland boundary that has, inadvertently, helped preserve its outline.