A grass-covered circle roughly 36 metres across sits on a natural rise on a northeast-facing ridge slope in County Tipperary, its enclosing bank worn low by centuries of cattle grazing along its outer edge. The bank itself, built of gravelly clay, is still wide enough to read clearly at around 4.5 metres across, though it rises only about 0.7 metres on the interior side and just under a metre on the exterior, except where the downslope face reaches closer to 2 metres. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically runs outside such an enclosure, visible above ground today.

A rath, as this type of ringfort is classified, was the everyday enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country in varying degrees of preservation. What makes the Gortnalara example quietly interesting is that its interior carries traces of lazy beds, the characteristic ridged cultivation furrows used across Ireland from the medieval period through to the post-Famine era, aligned north to south on the eastern side of the enclosure, with possible smaller cultivation beds on the western portion running east to west. The two different alignments suggest the interior may have been worked at different times or for different purposes. A possible entrance gap of about 3.6 metres is visible in the northeast quadrant of the bank, consistent with the general orientation that many ringforts favour. The outer face of the bank has been partially truncated, most likely by generations of livestock moving along it, which is a familiar fate for earthwork monuments in active farmland.