The vegetation has colonised what was once a deliberately constructed enclosure, and the effect is oddly telling: the plants have found the same circular boundary that early medieval people dug and built, and they have held it ever since.

A rath, as this type of monument is known, is an earthen ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead used across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Families or small communities would raise a circular bank from the soil, with a ditch dug along the outside to increase the height differential and provide some degree of protection for livestock and people within. The example at Clooncon follows this pattern closely. Its circular area measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank that rises about seventy centimetres on the interior side and a more substantial one hundred and thirty-five centimetres when measured from the base of the external fosse, the term used for the surrounding ditch. That fosse itself is recorded at roughly one and a half metres wide and just over half a metre deep, modest dimensions but still clearly legible in the ground. The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011.

The site sits in ordinary-looking pasture, which is part of what makes it easy to overlook. There are no standing stones, no visible stonework, and no signage to draw the eye. What a visitor is most likely to notice first is the thicket itself, a mound of briar and thorn that resists any attempt to push through to the interior. According to the recorded survey, the overgrowth covers both the enclosing bank and the entire interior, making close inspection difficult. The cleaner view comes from the field margins, where the circular outline of the bank and the depression of the fosse can be read against the surrounding ground level, particularly in low winter light when vegetation dies back slightly and shadows do the interpretive work that signage does not.