Known in Irish as Lios Páirc Mhóir, it is a bivallate rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric earthen banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The inner bank barely rises above the surrounding ground in places, and the outer bank has all but vanished along much of the circuit. Badgers have worked through the western bank, a later field wall has been built against the outer face along three sides, and the interior conceals a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, that is now inaccessible. An antiquarian named Westropp, examining the site in 1911, speculated that a second gap in the inner bank, just east of south, might have been a sally-port, a secondary exit for defensive use, though the absence of any causeway across the fosse makes that reading uncertain.

What lifts the site out of the ordinary is the human story attached to it. The place-name itself carries weight: the element 'Páirc' denotes a large cleared area associated with an important residential site, and Parkmore is reputed to have served as the principal seat and house of hospitality of the Uí Dhálaigh, a learned family of poets and scholars. The Uí Dhálaigh traced their origins to a line of poets from Meath who established branches across Ireland, and it may have been through a Cistercian connection, routed via Boyle in Co. Roscommon, that one branch eventually settled at Finavarra on the Clare coast. Documentary sources place them there by at least the mid-fourteenth century, and they maintained a school in or near Parkmore. An early seventeenth-century description recorded the place as 'wealthy and coloured white'. Nearby, a leacht cuimhne, a commemorative stone monument, is associated by tradition with the bardic poet Donncha Mór Ó Dálaigh, who died in 1244 and who is said to have settled at Finavarra. The rath, the school, the monument, and the name together suggest a site that was once a functioning centre of Gaelic literary culture, now reduced to low earthen banks and a badger sett.