What remains is semicircular rather than round, measuring roughly eighteen metres on its longer axis and eleven on the shorter, defined partly by a scarp, a slight step cut into or built up from the ground, and partly by a low bank. The effect is fragmentary, the kind of earthwork that rewards patient looking rather than immediate recognition.

Enclosures of this type are scattered across Ireland and broadly associated with the early medieval period, though without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. Some enclosed a farmstead, others a burial ground, others structures whose purpose is now irrecoverable. The monument at Gortnalone sits in fair condition despite the intrusion of field boundaries at its south-south-west and northern edges, the agricultural reorganisation of later centuries having quietly overwritten whatever the original circuit once contained. Two further earthwork monuments lie nearby to the north-west, suggesting that this corner of Galway held some sustained significance across time, even if the nature of that significance is no longer legible on the surface.