It measures roughly fourteen metres east to west and ten metres north to south, and its boundary is an earthen scarp, a low bank or ridge of earth, that barely reaches thirty centimetres in external height. There is no visible fosse, the ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, and the side running from the north-east around to the south-east has worn down further still, becoming low and irregular. Where people once entered, no trace remains.

Enclosures of this kind are scattered across Ireland, and their purposes varied considerably. Some defined farmsteads, some marked burial grounds, and some served functions that are now difficult to reconstruct. The place name Caltragh is itself suggestive; it derives from the Irish "cealtrach", a word associated with old burial grounds or ecclesiastical enclosures, often pre-Norman in origin. That association does not confirm what this particular earthwork was for, but it does place it within a landscape that has carried human significance for a very long time. The wet, low-lying ground around it would have made the slight elevation of the enclosure all the more deliberate, a managed space set apart from its surroundings even if the boundary that once defined it has largely melted back into the field.