What makes this particular rath, the Irish term for a ringfort built from earthen banks rather than stone, slightly unusual is the way it has been absorbed into a later landscape without quite disappearing. The interior has been planted with deciduous trees, and the western side of the earthwork was deliberately built up higher than the eastern side to compensate for the natural fall of the hillslope, giving the enclosed ground an artificially level feel.

The earthen bank that defines the enclosure measures roughly 35.5 metres across its east-west axis, with an internal height of about 0.85 metres and an external height of 1.2 metres along its western and southern arc. A fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to reinforce the boundary, runs around the north-eastern to south-eastern stretch and survives to a depth of around 0.6 metres. Ringforts of this kind are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, broadly the period from the fifth to the twelfth century, and would typically have enclosed a farmstead and its ancillary structures. At Curragh, however, the monument did not survive entirely intact. Along the southern to western arc, the bank has been levelled where a demesne wall, the boundary of a later landed estate, was built just outside the enclosure. That collision of features, early medieval earthwork meeting post-medieval estate infrastructure, says something about how Irish farmland layers its past without always preserving it.