Its position beside an avenue leading up to a big house strongly suggests that, at some point, the fort was consciously incorporated into a designed landscape, valued not for any ancient purpose but for the visual effect of a grassy mound punctuating a gentleman's approach.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A family would have lived and kept animals within the bank, which served as both boundary and a modest defensive barrier. The Garryduff example is a fairly typical specimen in structural terms: a roughly circular area of about 37 metres in diameter, surrounded by a bank of earth and stone that measures around 4.2 metres wide. The bank stands between 0.7 and 1.25 metres above the interior ground level, and slightly higher on its outer face. What is less typical is the fate of the interior, where clay and dead wood have been dumped over time, obscuring whatever archaeology might lie beneath. Mature trees have taken hold around the bank, and the enclosed space has been left to nettles and brambles, the whole thing ringed off now with post and wire fencing.