Most raths, the earthen enclosures that once surrounded early medieval farmsteads across Ireland, read as roughly circular from the ground or from above. The one at Carrownaguivna pushes against that expectation, its roughly triangular outline measuring around 33.8 metres north to south and 27.6 metres east to west, defined not by a cleanly surviving bank but by a scarp, essentially a steep drop at the edge of the raised interior, falling between 1.25 and 1.7 metres depending on which side you approach.

Along the southern edge, the upper lip of that scarp is lined with a rough kerb of stones, and just inside it sits a low stony rise about 1.4 metres wide. This is likely all that survives of what was once a more substantial bank or wall, the kind of boundary that would have given the enclosure both physical definition and social significance, marking off a household's space in a landscape where such distinctions mattered. The northern and north-eastern stretches of the scarp have fared worse. Modern field boundaries have cut across and absorbed parts of the perimeter, flattening or obscuring the original form. The entrance, wherever it once was, is no longer legible. Inside the south-eastern quadrant, a concentration of largely sod-covered stones includes a linear feature running roughly five metres on a north-east to south-west axis, its purpose unclear but suggestive of internal structure, perhaps the ghost of a wall or a building line from the enclosure's period of use.