Whatever gap or gateway once allowed people inside has long since disappeared, leaving a site that reads, at first glance, as a self-contained and quietly baffling ring in the landscape. The outer fosse, a wide shallow ditch that runs along the north-western arc, is still legible on the ground, and the earthen bank that defines the enclosure survives to nearly two metres in height on its exterior face in places, though the interior has been reduced considerably over time. The whole area is overgrown, which adds to the impression of something deliberately closed off.

An embanked enclosure of this kind belongs to a broad class of earthwork found throughout Ireland, usually associated with the early medieval period, though precise dating without excavation is difficult. What makes the Dergraw example particularly interesting is its relationship with a neighbouring rath, a defended farmstead of the sort that would once have housed a farming family and their livestock behind a bank and ditch. That rath sits immediately to the north-west, but the two monuments are separated by a later field bank and drain running roughly north-east to south-west, suggesting that at some point the landscape around them was reorganised in a way that drew a boundary between structures that may originally have functioned in close proximity. Whether the enclosure predates the rath, postdates it, or was in use at the same time remains an open question, and one that the surface evidence alone cannot settle.