A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from around 500 to 1000 AD, and used as a farmstead or defended homestead. This one at Carroward is modest in scale, measuring just under twenty metres in diameter, and has been so thoroughly integrated into its surroundings that the original entrance can no longer be identified.

What survives is a slightly raised circular platform, defined on its northern and north-eastern and eastern sides by a scarp, a natural or cut slope, that merges at the north with the steep face of the knoll itself. Along the upper edge of the scarp, running from the south-east around through the south to the north-west, there is a low earthen rise roughly three to three and a half metres wide and about sixty centimetres high on the interior. This remnant bank was revetted internally, meaning it was faced or supported with stone or timber on the inside to hold its shape, and it is now capped with a low field boundary wall, the practical concerns of later farming having quietly overwritten the earlier structure. The knoll's north-facing position at the base of the Ox Mountains would have made this an easily defensible, naturally prominent site, the steep slope to the north doing much of the work that an elaborate bank and ditch might otherwise have been required to do.