What makes it quietly puzzling is the absence of two features you would normally expect: there is no visible ditch, and no clear entrance. Most raths, the common Irish term for a ringfort, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks thrown up from an accompanying ditch. Here, the ditch is simply not there, or at least no longer legible on the ground.

The enclosure measures roughly 18.5 metres across internally, placing it at the smaller end of the ringfort scale. It was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic project that first systematically documented Ireland's landscape and its antiquities, where it appears as a hachured enclosure, the conventional mapmaker's symbol for a raised, banked feature. The fact that it survives on current maps in the same form suggests the earthwork has remained largely intact. Carrowkeel itself is a townland already associated with prehistoric remains, and while this ringfort belongs to a later tradition, it sits within a landscape that has been shaped and reshaped by people across many centuries.