Where a circular earthen enclosure once defined someone's farmstead, possibly early medieval in origin, the land has been levelled and returned to pasture. The only surface clue today is a slightly denser scatter of stones within the area of the site compared to the surrounding field, a quiet anomaly that most walkers would pass without a second thought. From above, however, aerial photography has revealed the ghost of the original structure as a cropmark, the differential growth of plants over buried soil betraying the outline of a bank and its external fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the outside of the enclosure.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as protected farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The example at Gortnacreha measured roughly 25 metres in diameter, making it a modest but standard example of the type. By the time Bowman recorded it in 1934, citing the site on land belonging to a H. O'Donoghue, the fosse had already been infilled and only a single rampart was noted. The site does not appear on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map at all, though later editions from 1904 and 1938 depict an arc of hachures indicating the bank running from south to north, suggesting the earthworks were still at least partially visible in the early twentieth century before being fully levelled. There may also be a souterrain beneath the interior, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlements, often used for storage or refuge, though its presence here remains tentative.