It does not announce itself. The bank that once defined its perimeter has been worn down over centuries to little more than a scarp in places, and the interior is largely given over to rushes. Yet the geometry of the place is still legible if you know what you are looking for, and it has been legible for a long time: the feature appears hachured on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1840 and 1916, meaning surveyors in two separate centuries judged it worth marking.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in Ireland. A rath typically consisted of an earthen bank and external ditch enclosing a roughly circular area used as a farmstead, probably between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Here, the internal diameter runs to about 16.5 metres north to south, and the earthen bank, where it survives, is around 3.1 metres wide, though in height it barely reaches ten centimetres above the interior surface. An outer fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to define the boundary, runs alongside it at roughly the same width. Both bank and fosse are clearest on the northern to south-south-western arc; elsewhere they disappear beneath dense vegetation. Two gaps break through the bank, one on the east-south-east at about two metres wide and a narrower one to the east-north-east, though whether either represents an original entrance is difficult to say. No internal features are visible. What makes the location quietly notable is that it does not stand alone: a second rath lies approximately 80 metres to the west, the two enclosures occupying the same low ridge, suggesting this part of Knocknaraha supported at least a small cluster of early settlement activity.