The monument at Gortahumma is a ring barrow, a type of funerary earthwork typically consisting of a central mound surrounded by a circular ditch and outer bank, constructed during the Bronze Age as a marker for the dead. This one is small and worn, measuring roughly five metres across its north-south axis and rising only half a metre above the poorly drained ground around it, but the basic anatomy of the form is still legible to a careful eye.

What makes the site quietly compelling is the layering of different kinds of boundary across a single patch of ground. The outer bank, now only about ten centimetres high and visible on the northern side only, is intersected by a townland boundary running northeast to southwest. Townland boundaries in Ireland are often ancient in origin, running across the landscape for centuries or longer, and here one has been drawn, at some point in the past, directly across the fabric of a monument that was itself already old. The inner fosse, the shallow ditch separating the mound from its enclosing bank, survives at around thirty centimetres deep and just over two metres wide. The overall shape of the mound is irregular rather than the neat circular form the type ideally presents, a consequence of poor preservation over a long span of time on wet, upland ground.