This particular example at Fauleens sits on a gentle rise, and its designers made deliberate use of the topography: the ground climbs to the south and falls away to the north, lending the structure a natural advantage that its builders then amplified with considerable effort in earth and stone.

The rath is roughly circular, measuring 32 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south. It follows the classic form of an inner bank enclosing a raised interior, with a fosse, a defensive ditch, immediately outside that bank, and then a further external bank beyond the fosse. What sets this example apart is how much of that layered defensive scheme survives in legible detail. The inner bank still carries remnants of drystone facing on its inner slope, an indication that its original builders were working with both earth and carefully placed stone. The fosse is described as deeply cut and well defined around most of its circuit. There appear to have been two entrance gaps in the inner bank, each with a causeway crossing the fosse; the one at the east-south-east may represent the original entrance, though it is now blocked at the outer edge of the fosse by a later field fence. The western gap and its causeway have become the practical access point in modern times. In the interior, traces of cultivation ridges run on a north-east to south-west axis, a sign of agricultural use long after the rath's primary function had faded. There is also a grassed-over hollow in the north-west quadrant, with several slabs and boulders protruding from it, and a rough arc of large stones along the inner face of the northern bank; neither feature has been conclusively explained.

The southern arc of the outer bank has been absorbed into the working farm landscape, topped with a stone wall and serving as a field boundary, which means it is now densely clothed in gorse, brambles, blackthorn, and hawthorn. The same scrub is pressing inward along the inner bank. Approaching from the west, where the causeway is still in use, gives the clearest sense of how the double-bank-and-fosse arrangement would have presented itself to anyone arriving, or being kept out, in the early medieval period.