This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that was the dominant form of rural habitation in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. What makes the example at Carrickconeen particularly worth attention is the condition and geometry of its surviving earthworks, and a small central hollow that raises questions the ground itself cannot quite answer.

The enclosure measures approximately 39 metres north to south and 38.5 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical size for a single-farmstead rath. Its surrounding bank survives most impressively on the northern side, where it reaches an external height of over two metres, with a base width of more than six metres. That dramatic profile may owe something to accident rather than original construction: a depression just outside the monument to the north suggests quarrying activity at some point, and exposed bedrock at the base of the bank indicates the ground here was cut away, which would have made the bank appear taller from the outside than it originally stood. On the southern arc, the bank rises about 1.3 metres above the exterior. There is a proper entrance gap in the eastern quadrant, 1.8 metres wide, along with two cattle gaps punched through the bank at later dates, one in the southwest and a narrower one in the northwest. Running concentrically around the outside of the western, southern, and eastern sectors is a field bank with stone revetment, a facing of stone used to stabilise an earthen structure, which suggests the enclosure was integrated into a broader pattern of land management at some point in its history. At the centre of the interior sits a hollow roughly 2.6 metres across and 0.43 metres deep, ringed by a low earthen bank. This feature may be the result of later digging to remove building material, or it could mark the collapse of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of stone-lined construction that was often built beneath early medieval settlements for storage or refuge.