It is easy to miss, and that is part of what makes it worth understanding. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, raths were built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for local farming families. Thousands survive across the island, many reduced to little more than a crop mark or a slightly raised field, but this example at Ballykeating retains enough of its original form to read as a coherent structure.

The site measures approximately eighteen metres across on its east-west axis and is defined by two concentric earthen banks separated by a fosse, the term for the ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to add an additional barrier. The outer bank still stands roughly a metre high on its inner face and rises to about one and a half metres on its outer face, with a shallow external fosse still traceable to around sixty centimetres in depth. The eastern side preserves the clearest profile of the bankwork, and there are gaps, probably original entrances, on both the east and west sides, the eastern break measuring just over three metres wide. The inner bank has been disturbed on its western arc, apparently quarried for stone at some point, a common fate for earthworks that sat in farmland across centuries when building material was scarce and convenient. The whole enclosure is now overgrown with trees, which both obscures and, in a certain way, preserves what remains beneath.