What survives is a roughly circular enclosure, measuring about 23 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, defined by a low bank of large stones bound with earth that stands no more than 20 centimetres above the ground. This is a rath, the most common form of ringfort found across Ireland, typically the enclosed homestead of a prosperous farming family during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. At Aughnalyra, the bank is heavily overgrown, gaps have opened on the east-south-east, west, and north-west sides, and the interior, which slopes down toward the south-west, has been put to use as a convenient dump for field stones cleared from the surrounding pasture.

That last detail is telling. Ringforts were once so numerous in the Irish landscape, numbering in the tens of thousands nationally, that many were simply absorbed into agricultural routine, their banks robbed for walls or their interiors pressed into service as the Aughnalyra example has been. The low profile of this particular site, with its bank barely visible above ground level, suggests either significant erosion over time or that the original earthwork was never especially imposing. Ringforts of this scale and modest construction were typically the homes of ordinary farming families rather than high-status lords, whose enclosures tended to be larger, more elaborately banked, and sometimes accompanied by additional outer enclosures or souterrains, underground stone-lined passages used for storage or refuge.