A rath, as this type of enclosure is commonly known, is an early medieval earthwork, typically circular, built to define a farmstead and signal its occupant's status within the landscape. This one at Carrickfin measures roughly 27 metres in diameter, a modest footprint, and what survives today tells a story of slow, incremental erasure.

When the site was described in 1978, surveyors recorded a roughly circular area enclosed by the classic sequence of a rath: an inner bank, an intervening fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank beyond that. Even then, the inner bank of earth and stone, though fairly wide, had been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low eroded edge rather than a proper raised bank. The fosse, the hollow that would once have separated the two banks, was visible only as a very shallow and narrow depression running from the south-west around through west, north, and north-east. Traces of the outer bank survived at the south and west. The original entrance, which in a well-preserved rath would typically appear as a gap or causeway through the earthworks, could not be identified at all. Inside the enclosure, cultivation ridges run north-west to south-east, evidence that the interior was put to agricultural use at some point after the ringfort fell out of its original function. Low, stony outcrops sit in the northern and north-western quarters, and two later banks cut across the remains, one intersecting the scarp at the north and another at the east, suggesting the site was reused and reorganised at least twice over the centuries. The views northward and westward remain open and wide, even as the monument itself has faded into the pasture around it.