The enclosing bank that once defined its roughly circular perimeter, measuring around 45 metres across its NNW to SSE axis, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that across much of its eastern arc it leaves no trace at the surface at all. Two separate field walls have cut across and overlain the monument at different points, one slicing through from the north-east around to the south-east, another overlying the enclosure's north-western edge. The fort has not so much been demolished as gradually erased.

A rath, to use the technical term, is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically a farmstead surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, occupied broadly between the sixth and twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across Ireland, and many have fared better than this one. What distinguishes Turloughgarve is the puzzle left behind inside the enclosure: two subcircular hollows in the ground, with a low mound of earth and stone placed centrally between them. The mound is tentatively described as possible upcast, material thrown up during the original digging of pits or a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes built beneath raths for storage or refuge. Whether that interpretation holds or not, the arrangement of hollows and mound suggests activity within the interior that went beyond simple habitation, even if its precise nature is now beyond recovery.