The earthwork at Carrigeen sits on a west-facing pastoral slope, and by the time the Ordnance Survey returned to map it in 1905 and again in 1936, the eastern half of what had once been a complete circular enclosure had already been levelled, most likely consumed by the north-south roadway running immediately alongside it. What survives today is roughly half a monument, a curved arc of earthen bank swinging from south-southwest around to the north, with an external fosse, a ditch ringing the outer edge, still faintly visible to the southwest.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earth rather than stone, were the standard farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, in use roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were domestic rather than military in character, the raised bank and ditch serving to define a household's territory and keep livestock secure. The Carrigeen example is modest in scale: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately twenty-two metres in diameter. The surviving bank still stands to around 1.7 metres on its inner face and 1.75 metres externally, which gives some sense of its original solidity. A short stretch of stone facing remains visible on the inner face of the bank to the west, suggesting the builders reinforced at least part of the structure with dressed material. There is also a break in the bank between west and west-northwest, which may represent an original entrance. A trackway runs east to west through the interior, and spoil heaped against the northern bank is thought to be debris pushed there from the sections already lost.