Set on a south-westerly slope of a low upland rise, the site presents itself today as little more than a shallow scarp, roughly a metre in height, curving around a roughly oval area measuring 34 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west. That modest lip of earth is all that remains of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a circular earthwork enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. The scarp is broken at the north on an east-west axis, a gap that may once have served as an entrance.

The site might have remained entirely unrecognised had it not appeared on an aerial photograph taken in April 1974, part of the Geological Survey of Ireland series. From the air, crop marks and earthwork shadows reveal what ground-level inspection easily misses, and this photograph, catalogued as GSI S.602/3, made the levelled enclosure visible in a way that walking the field would not. Some 170 metres to the south-east, another vanished monument survives in the record, a levelled moated site, which is a later medieval form of enclosed settlement typically associated with Anglo-Norman landholding. The proximity of the two monuments, from different periods and different traditions of enclosure, suggests the ridge at Gragaugh was considered a worthwhile place to settle across several centuries, a judgement the good views in all directions from the site make easy to understand.