The rath, as this type of ringfort is known, is a roughly circular raised platform around 35 metres in diameter, bounded by an earthen bank that survives unevenly around its circuit. On the south-west side, where the ground drops away sharply, the outer face of the bank is almost vertical, rising nearly 1.8 metres above the surrounding land. On the north-east side it is lower and more worn. A gap of about two metres in the bank on the north-east may mark the position of the original entrance.

Ringforts, built mainly between the sixth and tenth centuries, were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland. They were not military fortifications in any grand sense but enclosed homesteads, the earthen bank providing a degree of security for livestock and a clear boundary of domestic space. The Brackloon example follows the pattern closely: a single bank, a probable eastern entrance, and a position chosen for natural advantage. The abrupt fall of ground to the south-west would have made the enclosure easier to defend on that side without additional effort. A later field wall, running on a roughly north-north-east to south-south-west axis, now cuts across the eastern half of the interior, an intrusion that tells its own quiet story about how the land was reorganised in more recent centuries, the old boundary absorbed into a newer agricultural order.

The interior and perimeter are now heavily overgrown with blackthorn and hawthorn scrub, with only a small area near the south-east relatively clear. This density of thorny growth is itself typical of old raths across Ireland; the scrub tends to colonise undisturbed earthworks and, in a practical sense, has helped protect the bank from ploughing. The good views from the ridge that the site commands remain, even if the enclosure itself requires some patience to read through the vegetation.