What survives at Tirlickeen is a ringfort, one of the thousands of roughly circular enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used as farmsteads or places of status and security. This one is easy to miss: a raised circular platform of about forty metres in diameter, its defining banks worn low and wide by centuries of agricultural activity.

The monument retains the essential anatomy of its type, even if time has been unkind to the detail. A main bank of earth and stone, now spread to a width of around five metres but standing only fifteen to thirty-five centimetres above the surrounding ground, once enclosed the interior. Beyond it lies a fosse, the shallow ditched depression that was dug to provide material for the bank and to add a further barrier, running about four metres wide and surviving to a depth of roughly eighty centimetres. An outer bank sits beyond that, narrower and somewhat better preserved at thirty to fifty centimetres in height, though much of it has been absorbed into a modern field boundary, which is how a great deal of these monuments quietly disappear from the landscape without ever being formally demolished. A lane skirts the monument along its northern arc, and a gap of about three and a half metres in the main bank at the east-north-east may be the ghost of the original entrance.