On a plateau in County Waterford, where the land drops away into ravines to the west and north, sits a ringfort that has lost most of the features that would normally give such a site its legibility. There is no visible fosse, the defensive ditch that typically runs around the outside of a rath, and the entrance has vanished entirely. Part of the enclosing earthen bank has been absorbed into a later field wall, and the southern half of the interior is now thick with conifer planting. What remains is a roughly oval earthwork, measuring about 31 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, with a bank that survives to a modest external height of between 0.6 and 1.3 metres on the better-preserved stretches and falls to little more than a low scarp on others.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen and cashels when built in stone, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, most dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They typically enclosed a farmstead or the home of a local landholding family, protected by a bank and ditch combination and sometimes by a timber palisade on top. The example at Curraghateskin fits the modest end of that tradition: subcircular in plan, single-banked, and positioned on higher ground in a way that would have given its occupants a natural defensive advantage from two directions, where the plateau edge and the flanking ravines did the work that earthworks might otherwise have had to do. That the fosse has left no trace above ground may mean it was never especially deep here, or simply that centuries of agricultural use have levelled what once existed.