A rath, as these earthen enclosures are known, was typically built as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, consisting of a raised circular bank and ditch surrounding a domestic interior. This one, roughly 31 metres in diameter, follows that pattern, but time and the later activities of the estate have complicated the picture considerably.

The site survives in a worn and fragmented state. Two banks once defined the enclosure, separated by an intervening fosse, the ditch that would have made the whole structure more formidable. In places, a scarp, essentially a steep natural or cut slope, takes over as the inner enclosing element where the bank has degraded. The outer bank can still be traced from the south-southwest around through west to north, though at that northern point it disappears beneath a later field wall, absorbed into the agricultural geometry of the Clonbrock demesne as the estate was developed and reorganised in later centuries. The interior has been planted with trees, which both preserves the ground from further disturbance and makes any clear reading of the original layout difficult. A second earthwork lies roughly 200 metres to the northeast, suggesting this was not an isolated settlement but part of a wider pattern of early occupation across the landscape.

The Clonbrock estate itself was the seat of the Dillon family, and its woodland character today reflects the ornamental planting of that later landlord period. Visiting the ringfort means navigating a setting that has been shaped by at least two entirely different eras of land use, the early medieval and the eighteenth and nineteenth century demesne, laid one over the other in ways that are still visible if you know what to look for.