What it actually marks is a ringfort, or rath, a type of circular enclosed settlement used across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, typically serving as a farmstead for a single family and their livestock. This one at Clynan sits on a gentle rise, its presence signalled less by any dramatic earthwork than by a quiet irregularity in the landscape.

A survey carried out in 1976 recorded the site in some detail. The enclosed area is roughly subcircular, measuring approximately 34 metres on a north-northwest to south-southeast axis and about 32 metres east-northeast to west-southwest. Around its perimeter runs a low bank of earth and stone, with an external fosse, that is, a ditch, running outside it. The steep scarp defining the structure stands between one and one and a half metres high, and along a stretch running from the east-southeast around through south to north, this scarp has been absorbed into a modern field boundary, the kind of quiet recycling of ancient earthworks that farmers have carried out for centuries without necessarily knowing what they were incorporating. A shallow depression was noted just inside the bank on the southwest side, though its purpose was not established. The original entrance to the enclosure can no longer be identified, worn away or altered beyond recognition by the passage of time and agricultural use.