What makes Carrickittle unusual is not a single dramatic monument but the density of them: twelve archaeological features gathered within a compact area, including at least nine ring-barrows, a tumulus, and two platforms. Ring-barrows are a type of prehistoric funerary monument, typically consisting of a low circular mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse. They are common enough across Ireland, but finding nine of them in close proximity, sharing the same soggy ground beside a road and a sand-pit, gives the site a quietly peculiar character.

The most detailed account of the complex comes from the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly, writing in 1944. O'Kelly noted that all twelve monuments occupy the same low-lying marshy terrain, spread across three adjoining fields. Eight of the barrows and the two platforms share one field, a ninth barrow sits in the nearest corner of the field to the north, and a tumulus occupies the nearest corner of the field to the east. What struck O'Kelly was both the uniformity and the variation: every barrow is constructed in exactly the same way, consisting of a slight circular mound ringed by a fosse with no outer bank, yet their diameters range considerably, from around 4.5 metres up to roughly 11 metres. He also observed that there is no obvious deliberate arrangement to how they are laid out across the fields, which raises its own quiet questions about how and why they accumulated here.

The site lies immediately east of a road, which O'Kelly recorded as running along the western edge of all the monuments. Because the barrows are described as very slight mounds, they may not be immediately obvious to a visitor unfamiliar with what to look for; the defining feature in the field is likely to be the circular depressions of the fosses rather than any dramatic rise in the ground. The marshy character of the meadow means conditions underfoot can be wet, particularly outside the summer months. Visitors should expect to be reading a fairly flat agricultural landscape rather than encountering anything visually imposing, and the reward here is more a matter of knowing what lies beneath the grass than anything announced by the terrain itself.