Until relatively recently, the ring barrow at Cloghauninchy was catalogued simply as an "enclosure", a catch-all term that tells you almost nothing about what you are actually looking at. A ring barrow is a funerary monument, typically of Bronze Age origin, consisting of a central mound or platform surrounded by a circular ditch and an outer bank. The intention was to mark and separate the burial space from the world of the living. This one has survived well enough that its structure can still be read in the landscape, though it takes a careful eye.

The monument sits on the northern slopes of a ridge, with marshy ground to the north. At its centre is a roughly circular area about sixteen metres across, defined by a low bank up to eight metres wide. Beyond that bank lies a flat-bottomed fosse, which is the ditch that encircles the central area, between seven and ten metres wide at its base. An outer bank surrounds this in turn, and along the eastern and southern sides it has been absorbed into a later field boundary, giving the whole monument an external diameter of nearly forty-seven metres at its widest. A narrow entrance, about 1.7 metres wide, survives in the outer bank at the east-north-east, and is considered likely to be original rather than a later break. The site is bisected by a townland boundary running northwest to southeast, which has had a visible effect on the ground cover: the northeastern portion remains open and grassy, while the southwestern portion has become overgrown.