The 1840 edition shows a ringfort of considerable size, roughly 42 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west; by the 1904 to 1905 edition, the same enclosure appears noticeably smaller, recorded at around 27 by 28 metres. The monument itself has not shrunk, of course, but the discrepancy hints at how inconsistently these earthworks were mapped over time, and how easy it has been to lose track of their true extent beneath encroaching field boundaries and vegetation.

A rath is the commonest type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically a roughly circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or defended homestead. The Cloghanacody example sits just off the crest of a hill on a south-south-westerly facing slope, in what is now meadow ground. It is defined by a scarp rising 1.72 metres over a horizontal distance of 4 metres, and a flat-bottomed fosse, the external ditch that runs around the outside of the bank, measuring 2 metres wide and over a metre deep. On the south-south-eastern side, part of the scarp has eroded and earth has collapsed down into the fosse. There is a possible original entrance in the eastern quadrant, still traceable as a gap roughly 2 metres wide, with what appears to be a ramp and a causeway crossing the fosse. The interior tilts gently downward toward the south-south-west, as the hillside beneath it does.

The site is heavily overgrown with scrub and has suffered badly from cattle poaching, the churning and compaction of soft ground by livestock that gradually damages earthwork profiles from the outside in. Both the vegetation and the livestock damage make it difficult to read the monument clearly from ground level, though the scarp and fosse are still measurable features. It sits within a field boundary that was already present on both the nineteenth-century maps, suggesting the surrounding agricultural landscape has long folded this early medieval enclosure into its own geometry.