Two ringforts on one spit of land, facing each other across a shallow interval of pasture, is not the kind of arrangement you stumble across every day.

A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically dating to the early medieval period, built as a farmstead enclosure and defined by a raised bank, a surrounding ditch called a fosse, and sometimes an outer bank beyond that. This example at Ballyglass is a substantially raised circular platform, roughly 31 metres north to south and 35.5 metres east to west, set off from the surrounding land by a scarp that drops as much as 2.4 metres on the eastern side. That eastern face is steeper partly by design and partly because the natural slope of the ridge reinforces it, giving the monument an asymmetrical profile that is more dramatic from one direction than the other. Outside the platform, a fosse, now reduced to a shallow depression about two metres wide, traces the circuit of the enclosure, and on the eastern half the remnants of an outer bank survive as a low rise, its outer edge once incorporated into a field boundary that has since been removed. The interior itself is not a flat floor: the western half levels off, while the eastern half slopes back down toward the perimeter scarp. Most visibly, prominent cultivation ridges cross the entire interior right to the edge, giving the western scarp a distinctly scalloped outline when seen from ground level. Where the original entrance stood is not certain, but the likeliest candidate is the northwest, where a two-metre section of the scarp sits lower than the surrounding ground; a secondary slumped area on the south may also be significant. The views from the site open eastward and south-eastward across low-lying pasture and bog stretching away into County Galway, the kind of wide, flat horizon that would have made any approaching visitor clearly visible from some distance.