The site at Drumbaragh is a rath, the most common type of early Irish farmstead, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family and their livestock would have lived. What makes this one quietly interesting is how legibly it has survived, and how long it has been recorded: it appears on McCrea's Map of County Monaghan, drawn in 1793, and on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps that followed in the nineteenth century.

The enclosure is oval in plan, measuring roughly 33 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, and it tilts slightly downward toward the east, following the natural fall of the ridge. An earthen bank defines the perimeter, varying considerably in height as it goes around, from little more than a lip at the northern interior to nearly a metre on the southern side, and rising to between two and two and a half metres on the western and northern exterior faces. Beyond the bank, a fosse, the term for the outer ditch that typically accompanied such earthworks, survives on the north-west to north-east and south-east to south-west arcs. The entrance is at the north-north-east, a gap at the base measuring just over two and a half metres wide, approached by a causeway a metre high that crosses the fosse. By 1995, scrub that had colonised the perimeter had been cleared, which will have made the bank and fosse considerably easier to read from ground level.