Sitting on a low rise in otherwise flat, level pasture in County Sligo, the rath at Carrowconor has survived well enough that its original southern entrance is still legible, a partially stone-lined gap just under two and a half metres wide breaking the circuit of the bank. Most ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that served as the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, have lost precisely this kind of detail to centuries of agricultural clearance.

The enclosure itself is roughly circular, measuring about 26.8 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. Its defining feature is a substantial bank of earth and stone, revetted in stone on its inner face, nearly six metres wide and standing to a surviving internal height of around 0.9 metres. Unusually, there is no fosse, the external ditch that typically accompanies such banks and from which the digging material would originally have been drawn. Part of the eastern section of the bank has been quarried away at some point, a common enough fate for any earthwork standing near a ready supply of stone. Inside, the north-western quadrant preserves the remains of a house site, giving a sense of how the enclosed space was actually occupied and organised. Perhaps most intriguing is a possible souterrain, an underground passage typically used for storage or refuge, which appears to extend inward from the area of the entrance. The junction of the entrance and an underground feature at the same point suggests a deliberate and considered piece of design.