The outer bank measures around 45.5 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, enclosing an area that would once have been a self-contained world of domestic life. A possible entrance gap on the south-south-west side, about 2.8 metres wide, hints at where people and animals once passed in and out.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. A rath consists of a raised earthen bank encircling a farmstead, providing a degree of shelter and enclosure rather than serious military defence. They were the everyday residences of farming families across the Irish countryside, and many thousands survive in various states of preservation. At Rahard, the earthen bank stands only about 0.6 metres high today, reduced by centuries of agricultural activity, but its circular outline remains legible. What gives this particular site a slightly curious quality is the way later land use has overlaid itself onto the original form: a stone fence runs along the top of the bank from the north-west around to the north-east, another skirts the base of the bank from the north-east to the south-west, and a third fence cuts straight across the interior on a roughly west-north-west to east-south-east line. The ringfort has, in effect, been quietly recruited into the surrounding field system, its prehistoric and early medieval boundaries now doing mundane pastoral duty.