The name is thought to connect the site to the Fitzgerald family of Desmond, and according to the nineteenth-century topographical writer Samuel Lewis, seventeen relatives of Garret Fitzgerald of the house of Desmond, killed during the siege of a nearby castle, were said to have been buried here. Whether Lewis recorded a genuine tradition or something already half-mythologised by his time, the detail gives this otherwise quiet earthwork an unexpectedly grim human story.

The rath itself, a ringfort of the earthen variety common across early medieval Ireland, is a substantial structure: roughly 37.5 metres across, enclosed by a bank that still rises to around 2.5 metres on the interior face, with an external fosse, or ditch, cut to a depth of about 1.25 metres. An aerial photograph taken in July 1989 revealed a cropmark indicating a second external fosse, invisible at ground level, which suggests the enclosure was once more heavily defended or demarcated than it appears today. The entrance, at 3.6 metres wide, faces north-west. The bank was planted with Scots Pine at some point, presumably the "neat planting" Lewis noted, and those trees still define the silhouette of the place. Inside, the ground slopes downward from all sides toward the entrance, and a low earthen feature sits near the centre, obscured by fallen branches and dense overgrowth. A cropmark of a rectangular field is also visible adjacent to the south-western side, and within roughly 40 to 90 metres lie two other archaeological features: a fulacht fiadh to the north-west, a type of ancient cooking site associated with the use of fire-heated stones and water-filled troughs, and a circular enclosure to the south-east, suggesting this was once a much more active landscape than it now appears.