It measures roughly 22 metres across, with a low earthen bank surviving to the east at just 35 centimetres high. That is not much to look at, and yet the local community has kept its name alive, continuing to call it a ringfort, which suggests a long, unbroken awareness of what lies quietly beneath the brambles and grass.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and ditch providing a degree of protection for a family, their livestock, and their stores. Thousands were built across the island, though many have been ploughed out or built over in the centuries since. This particular example in Kilgarriff is modest in scale, its earthen bank now barely raised above the pasture around it, but its survival in any form within working farmland is itself somewhat remarkable. The flat, low-lying ground beside the river valley would have offered the early farmers who built it reasonably fertile soil and ready access to water.