This is a ring barrow, a type of burial monument in which a central area is enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, with the excavated material thrown outward to form a surrounding bank. The one at Kilgobbin measures just over nine metres across internally, with the fosse dropping to around sixty centimetres in depth and the outer bank rising to roughly seventy centimetres. Small by any dramatic measure, but precise, and still legible in the landscape after perhaps three or four thousand years.

Ring barrows are found across Ireland and Britain, generally associated with the Bronze Age, when the practice of marking burial sites with earthen enclosures was widespread. The defining feature at Kilgobbin is the entrance on the eastern side, where a causeway of undug ground crosses the fosse, leaving a gap that would have allowed deliberate access to the interior. That the interior remains level suggests the monument has not been significantly disturbed, which is relatively unusual given how many such sites have been ploughed flat or robbed for field material over the centuries. The hilltop setting is typical; elevated ground was consistently chosen for these monuments, whether for visibility, for some cosmological reason now lost to us, or simply because the higher land was less useful for farming and therefore left alone.