That bank, however, rises to an internal height of two metres and encloses an area nearly 47 metres from north to south and 44 metres east to west, dimensions that place it comfortably within the range of a substantial early medieval rath. A rath is an earthen ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically built as a farmstead enclosure during the first millennium AD. What gives this one a slightly unusual character is the pairing of a clear entrance gap to the east-north-east, nearly six and a half metres wide, with a second, narrower break to the south, suggesting either a secondary access point or a later breach in the bank.

The external fosse, a defensive ditch running around the outside of the bank, survives to a depth of around one metre on the northern and southern sides, though it does not appear to be continuous around the full circuit. Inside, the ground is grass-covered, the ordinary agricultural activity of the surrounding fields having spared the interior from the plough. Tens of thousands of raths survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but many have been levelled by land improvement schemes over the past two centuries. This one, absorbed into a working tillage landscape on a sloping site in Cork, has kept its essential shape, the bank doing the quiet work of marking out a space that someone, over a thousand years ago, considered worth enclosing.