That kind of truncation is not unusual in the Irish midlands, where generations of road-building, drainage, and agricultural improvement have worked steadily against such earthworks, but the effect here is particularly stark: a monument already reduced to a low, scarp-like bank is further fragmented by the modern landscape it happens to occupy.

The site appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a roughly circular enclosure labelled simply "Fort", a label that in Irish cartographic convention typically indicates a rath, the ringfort type built in large numbers across Ireland from the early medieval period into the early historic era, generally serving as enclosed farmsteads. At Cormaglava, what survives is a slightly raised circular area of roughly 45 metres across, defined by a bank that reaches only about 0.65 metres in external height and has been largely worn down to a scarp. Faint traces of what may have been an external fosse, the shallow ditch that typically ran around the outside of such a bank, are still just discernible. A depression of around two metres in the scarp at the south-west may mark where the original entrance once stood. Attached to the south-east quadrant is a D-shaped secondary enclosure, a feature sometimes called an annexe, which may have served as a stock pen or working area ancillary to the main enclosure. Where the rath and this annexe meet, there is a local tradition of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often associated with Irish ringforts, possibly used for storage or as a place of concealment.

The north-east quadrant, severed from the main body of the site by the road, survives across the verge in the adjacent field but is heavily overgrown, making close inspection difficult. The overall monument sits on a gentle north-facing slope in pasture, its outlines low enough that without prior knowledge of what to look for, it could easily be read as nothing more than a slight unevenness in the ground.