Roughly 25.5 metres of the bank can still be traced running from the south, around through the west, and up to the north, a partial embrace in the landscape that hints at a much fuller enclosure now largely lost to time, agriculture, or both.

Earthen ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. Thousands were built across the country between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, and County Monaghan, with its drumlin topography and dispersed settlement patterns, contains numerous examples in varying states of survival. The site at Formoyle represents one of the more fragmentary of these, where only a portion of the defining bank endures, giving little more than an outline of what the original enclosure looked like in plan.