What makes it particularly interesting is the way several different periods of land use have left their mark on a single, relatively modest structure, a raised circular area of around thirty metres across, defined by a bank of earth and stone that stands just over a metre high on its outer face.

Known as Cloonkee Fort on both the 1838 and 1922 Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the site belongs to the class of enclosed settlements known as raths, the ringforts that once served as farmsteads for early medieval Irish families, typically surrounded by a bank and ditch for the enclosure of livestock and the household within. The bank here tells a layered story. On the western half, the outer slope has been vertically cut and stone-faced, an alteration that appears to date not from the rath's original construction but from a later field fence that was built by incorporating the earthwork into its line, merging with the bank at the west-southwest and running beyond it to the south-east. A second field fence, aligned north to south, has further disturbed the outer slope at the north-east and east. Inside, a faint linear rise crossing the interior, incorporating a large boulder towards its western end, may be the remnant of yet another field boundary. Immediately outside the bank to the west, a shallow subcircular depression of around eight metres across is likely an old quarry pit. A second rath lies approximately 140 metres to the north, suggesting this corner of Mayo once supported a modest clustering of early medieval settlement activity.