The earthen bank has become a convenient dump for field stones over the generations, and the interior is now so heavily overgrown as to be mostly inaccessible. What might once have been a legible piece of early medieval landscape has, in a fairly ordinary way, been absorbed into the farming routine of the land it occupies.

This is a rath, the Irish word for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement built and used largely between the sixth and twelfth centuries, though examples vary considerably in date. A typical rath consisted of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, with a corresponding ditch, or fosse, dug to provide the material for those banks. They functioned as farmsteads and are the most common field monument in Ireland, with estimates running to tens of thousands surviving in various states across the country. The Ballyeightragh example measures roughly thirty metres in diameter. Its bank rises about half a metre on the interior side and just over a metre on the exterior, with a fosse still traceable to the north, though overgrown. Those measurements are modest but not unusual for a single-banked rath of this type.