What makes it worth a second look is not just the earthwork itself but the completeness of the defensive scheme still visible around it. This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval Irish settlement monument, typically consisting of one or more earthen banks enclosing a circular area where a farmstead once stood. At Kilgarriff, the inner bank, the fosse, and an outer bank are all still present, making the layered logic of the enclosure unusually legible.

The enclosed area measures roughly 25.5 metres north to south and 31.8 metres east to west, raised above the surrounding ground. The inner bank varies in height, standing lower on the western side and more pronounced on the east, where a fosse, essentially a defensive ditch dug to reinforce the bank above it, runs around the circuit and can still be picked out as a shallow depression in the grass. Beyond the fosse, a second, outer bank adds another layer to the arrangement. The entrance is at the east-south-east, where a gap in the inner bank lines up with a causeway across the fosse and a corresponding gap in the outer bank, a well-organised threshold that would have controlled movement in and out of the enclosure. The interior is level and grassy, though a semi-circular area of around ten metres has been quarried away from the bank and the north-west quadrant of the interior at some point, removing a portion of the original circuit. One hundred and fifty metres to the east, a second rath survives, suggesting this part of the ridge once supported more than one early medieval household in relatively close proximity, a reminder that these monuments are often found in clusters rather than in isolation. The ridge itself offers wide views across pasture, bog, and lakes to the south and west, and over a valley to the north, the kind of elevated, open position that early farmers clearly valued.