The enclosure measures approximately 11.8 metres north to south and around 10 metres east to west, and what gives it away, once you know what you are looking at, is the slight hollow at its centre and the asymmetry of its surviving bank. On the western side, a sod-covered stone bank still stands to an external height of 1.4 metres, its outer slope made steeper by the natural fall of the ground beneath it. On the north-eastern side, the bank has been absorbed almost entirely into a field boundary, though that field fence quietly follows the curve of the older structure, a small sign that the enclosure's shape has never quite been forgotten.

Enclosures of this kind, circular or near-circular areas defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, yet individually they tend to go unremarked. They are often described as ringforts, a broad term for enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, though the type persisted in use across a wide span of time. At Carrowcrom, the bank varies considerably depending on where you measure it: the interior height runs between 0.4 and 0.55 metres, while the exterior reaches 1.4 metres on the western side, that difference partly a product of deliberate construction and partly of the slope the builders chose to exploit. A scatter of field clearance stones has accumulated against the outer face of the bank at the south-west, the residue of generations of agricultural tidying that has both buried and preserved the structure's lower courses. A river runs roughly 150 metres to the east, and the Ox Mountains mark the horizon to the east and south, with Nephin Mountain visible to the west-south-west.