The monument at Killeennagallive sits on a very gentle south-west-facing slope in undulating Tipperary pasture, and at first glance it reads simply as a raised circular patch of ground. Look more carefully and the geometry of early medieval life begins to reassert itself, even through centuries of agricultural reworking.

The fort takes the form most commonly called a rath, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, where a family and their livestock would have lived within a raised earthen bank and surrounding ditch. Here the circular area measures around twenty metres in diameter, enclosed by a steep earthen scarp about one and a half metres high externally. Beyond it ran a flat-bottomed fosse, the ditch that provided both drainage and a degree of defence, originally two metres wide and around sixty centimetres deep. That fosse has since been considerably altered on several sides: infilled and barely traceable to the north-north-east and east, widened at its base to four metres on the north-east to east arc where its outer edge was straightened and incorporated into a field boundary running north-north-west to east-south-east, and on the south-east to south-south-west side, a public road has been laid directly over the outer half of the ditch. The original entrance has been lost entirely in this process of incremental change.

What remains of the interior has fared better. It is level, dry, and clear of overgrowth, and livestock tracks about one and a half metres wide cut through the scarped edge at the north and south-east, which now serve as the only way in. Those same animals that have worn the access points have, in a roundabout way, helped keep the interior open and readable. The ditch may be largely gone at ground level, but the raised platform of the rath itself still holds its shape against the slow drift of the surrounding farmland.