Roughly circular and measuring around 20 metres by 22 metres, it is enclosed by a bank of earth and stone that still stands up to 1.5 to 1.8 metres high on its northern side, giving it a more imposing profile than its interior height of barely 0.3 metres might suggest. Stones protruding from the outer face of the bank hint that it was once stone-faced, a detail that would have made the structure both more durable and more visually deliberate than the grassed-over earthwork visible today.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a class of monument built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Raths were typically the enclosed farmsteads of relatively prosperous farming families, the bank and any accompanying ditch serving as a boundary and a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people. The siting here is characteristic: the ridge offers good visibility over the surrounding ground, with a stream roughly 50 metres to the east and a steeper fall at the south providing natural advantages to whoever chose this spot. The interior slopes gently downward from north to south, and a shallow depression in the southern half may represent the trace of a structure or pit that once had a domestic purpose. A possible entrance gap through the bank on the northwest side is consistent with how such enclosures were typically oriented, and a second possible enclosure recorded immediately to the west suggests the site did not stand alone but formed part of a small cluster of activity in this part of Carrowcor.