The low bank enclosing it, barely 0.8 metres high and composed of earth and stone, is all that remains visible of a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure roughly 30 metres in diameter. It is the kind of site that quietly disappears into the everyday landscape, its original purpose unannounced, its age unconfirmed by any visible feature that would catch the casual eye.

Circular enclosures of this type are found across Ireland and can date anywhere from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period. They are often interpreted as settlement enclosures, the boundaries of a farmstead or small community, though without excavation it is difficult to say more with confidence about any individual example. What makes the Carriggower site slightly melancholy is the degree to which it has been worn down and cut across. The northern arc of the circle was truncated by the construction of a public road, and there is no surviving trace of an entrance gap or an external fosse, the shallow ditch that typically ran outside such banks and whose upcast material was used to build the bank itself. The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, where it appears marked with hachures, the small lines surveyors used to indicate an earthen bank or raised feature, suggesting it was already a recognised, if unexplained, presence in the landscape by that point.