What remains is less than half of what once stood, yet the southern arc of earthwork still describes the shape of something deliberate and carefully made, the kind of enclosed farmstead that would have been home to a farming family of middling status during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is essentially a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily to protect livestock and signal the social standing of whoever lived inside. At Carrick, only the southern half survives as upstanding remains, a semi-circular earthen bank reduced in places to a low scarp, with a shallow external fosse, a defensive ditch, running along the outer edge. The fosse has a base width of around 1.4 metres and a top width of 2.8 metres. A trace of an outer bank, approximately a metre high and 2.6 metres wide, is still just visible at the western side. The interior is uneven underfoot, rising from the perimeter inward, with a low circular platform of about nine metres in diameter sitting slightly south-west of centre. The roadway running north-west to south-east through the site has erased any trace of the northern enclosing bank entirely, and the original entrance cannot now be identified. A second possible ringfort lies roughly 145 metres to the north-north-east, suggesting this hilltop may once have supported a small cluster of related settlements. Lough Bane lies close to the north, and Carrick House to the east.

The site sits on a prominent hill with wide views across the surrounding countryside, though the remains themselves are heavily overgrown with trees and scrub, making it difficult to read the earthworks without some patience and a good eye for subtle changes in ground level.