The earthwork itself is reasonably intact around its edges, a subcircular enclosure roughly 56 metres across on its longer axis, ringed by a low earthen bank and a shallow fosse, the ditch dug at the bank's outer foot that would once have made the whole structure a more formidable boundary. What makes this particular example quietly unsettling is what happened inside: a natural spine of raised ground running through the middle of the enclosure was, at some point in the past, quarried out, leaving a ragged spread of pits and hollows measuring about 28 metres by 12 metres and half a metre deep. Whatever people were looking for, they left the interior looking more like a small, abandoned excavation than the floor of a former settlement.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the island. Most date to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and fosse marking the boundary of a family's domestic space rather than a true military fortification. This rath in Magheragillerneeve follows the general pattern: a single enclosing bank, a fosse at its base, and two gaps in the bank, one on the west at 2.2 metres wide and one on the east at 3.5 metres, either of which may preserve the line of the original entrance. A later field boundary bank cuts across the north-east, clipping the fosse, which suggests the land was reorganised at some point after the rath fell out of use, its outline absorbed into a working agricultural landscape without ever quite disappearing from it.