The ground is overgrown, the bank barely lifts above the surrounding earth, and a fringe of rushes at the south-western edge is about as dramatic as it gets. Yet the geometry is deliberate, the circle is real, and beneath the vegetation lies the faint outline of something people once built with purpose.

The enclosure measures roughly thirty metres in internal diameter and is defined by the remains of an earthen bank, surviving to a width of about five metres and a height of just thirty centimetres at the south-west. Earthen enclosures of this kind are broadly described as ringforts, a term covering a wide range of early medieval sites typically used as defended farmsteads or places of local assembly, though dating and function can vary considerably from one example to the next. At Roscarban, the original entrance has not been identified, and whatever clues the perimeter once held have been partly obscured by field spoil dumped against the edge over the years. The drumlin setting, that characteristic rolling glacial landscape of rounded hills formed from debris left by retreating ice sheets, would have made this a naturally prominent position in an otherwise low and boggy terrain, which may well have influenced its original siting. Michael J. Moore documented the site in the Archaeological Inventory of County Leitrim, published in 2003.