The southern portion of its circular enclosure has been ploughed flat over the generations, consumed by the demands of tillage farming, yet the northern arc of its earthen bank survives, tangled in nettles and scrub and quietly absorbed into the modern field boundary running alongside it. Only when you know what you are looking at does the low, broad curve of that remaining bank begin to read as something deliberate and ancient rather than a natural undulation in the ground.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were home to a single farming family, the circular bank and sometimes an accompanying fosse, or ditch, providing a degree of security for livestock and household. At Cloonmore the enclosure is substantial, with an overall diameter of around 63 metres and a surviving bank roughly three metres wide. A curving depression in the north-east interior hints at something more complex beneath the surface: if that depression is the remnant of an inner fosse, then what stands today is actually the outer bank of a double-banked enclosure, the interior bank and its ditch having been levelled long ago. That would give the original inner enclosure a diameter of around 24 metres, which is a modest but plausible space for an early medieval household. The possibility of a double enclosure, though far from confirmed, is one of the more quietly intriguing aspects of what might otherwise appear to be a fairly ordinary earthwork.