What remains of the ringfort at Carrowholla sits on a gentle rise in rolling County Galway grassland, and even in its diminished state it preserves enough geometry to read as what it once was: a circular earthwork, roughly twenty-five metres across, thrown up by early medieval farmers as both a farmstead boundary and a statement of presence in the landscape.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are sometimes called, was typically constructed with one or more raised banks encircling a central living area, often with a ditch, or fosse, cut between the banks to reinforce the boundary. The Carrowholla example was originally defined by two such banks with an intervening fosse between them, making it a bivallate construction and a more substantial undertaking than the single-banked ringforts that were once common across Ireland. The eastern half of the monument, however, has been almost completely levelled, almost certainly through centuries of agricultural use, ploughing, or the gradual cannibalising of earthworks for field boundaries and building material. What survives is therefore only a partial impression, the western arc still rising from the ground while the opposite side offers little to the eye.