A circular rath, roughly 35 metres in diameter, sits in gently undulating grassland, its form now so worn down that reading it as a coherent structure requires some patience and a willingness to look past modern intrusions. Three concentric banks, each separated by a fosse (a defensive ditch), originally defined this enclosure, but ploughing to the south-west has almost completely levelled the middle and outer banks on that side. A field boundary cuts across the monument at the south and west, and a later drystone wall has been built directly over the outer bank between the east and south. The interior still holds faint traces of earthworks, possibly associated with the original occupation of the site.

Ringforts, also called raths when constructed primarily from earthen banks, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly spanning the period from around 500 to 1000 AD, though many were built and used outside those dates. They typically enclosed a farmstead and its immediate domestic activities, with the banks and ditches serving as much to define status and contain livestock as to provide serious military defence. A site with three banks, like this one, would have represented a more substantial investment of labour and perhaps a household of greater local standing than the more common single-banked examples. The reference to a second ringfort lying approximately 200 metres to the east, noted in Killanin and Duignan's 1969 survey of Galway, suggests this part of Carrowmore was a settled and organised landscape rather than an isolated farmstead.