The briars and thorn that fill the interior have made the place largely impenetrable, and the cattle breaks cut into the bank at the south-east suggest that the surrounding farmer treats the enclosure more as a boundary feature than as anything requiring special attention. That ordinariness is, in its way, the point: this is what early medieval Ireland looks like when it has been farming country for a thousand years.

The site is a rath, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, a form of enclosed farmstead built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath typically consists of a circular or sub-circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family would have kept their home, outbuildings, and livestock. This example in Kilcolman West measures approximately forty metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank that still stands to around one and a half metres on the interior face. A notable feature is the D-shaped annex on the south side, formed by a smaller earth-and-stone bank running roughly eight metres north to south; annexes of this kind were commonly used as stock pens or garden plots. The bank survives best along the southern arc, though field boundaries have been built up against it at the west, north-east, and south-south-east, the result of centuries of agricultural reorganisation pressing in around the older structure. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The site sits on a gentle north-facing slope in pasture, which means the ground underfoot is likely to be soft in wet weather. The two cattle breaks cut into the south-east of the bank, each about two metres wide, give access to a small paddock between the enclosure and a field boundary a short distance to the east, so there is a practical routeway in, though the interior itself remains choked with vegetation. Anyone wanting to assess the earthworks properly would do best to walk the outer circuit of the bank, where the height and profile can still be read reasonably clearly, rather than attempt the interior. The southern arc, noted as the best-preserved section, offers the clearest sense of what the original enclosure looked like.