This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Hundreds of thousands of them once dotted the Irish countryside, and while many have been ploughed out or built over, this one in Gneeves retains enough of its original form to give a clear sense of what these structures looked like in use.

The enclosure measures roughly 26 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west across its interior, surrounded by an earthen bank that still rises nearly 1.9 metres above the ground on its outer face. Beyond the bank, a fosse, that is, a ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to add a further barrier, runs around much of the circuit, deepest on the eastern to south-eastern arc and continuing round to the north-northwest. A gap of almost ten metres breaks the bank to the northeast, most likely the original entrance, where a low external scarp survives beside it. The interior is slightly raised and slopes gently down toward the north. One small curiosity connects the site to the nineteenth century: the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 marks a limekiln on the western bank, a structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, but no surface trace of it remains today.