A curving arc of earthen bank, roughly twenty metres long and just over a metre high, follows the northern edge of a field fence on a north-west-facing slope, and just beyond it the ground dips into a shallow depression, the ghost of the fosse, the encircling ditch, that once defined the boundary of the whole enclosure.

This kind of site is a rath, the Irish term for the earthen ringforts that were built in their thousands across Ireland, most of them during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and fosse marking the boundary of a family's household and livestock rather than a military fortification in the conventional sense. What stands at Gortyowen is only the northern arc of what would once have been a complete or near-complete circuit. The rest has gone, levelled at some point into the surrounding pasture, leaving this single curving remnant as the only visible evidence that someone once chose this slope, with its north-westerly aspect, as a place to live and farm.