The example at Carrownavohanaun sits in level farmland in County Galway, where the flatness of the ground actually works in its favour, allowing the earthwork to read clearly against the landscape rather than dissolve into a hillside. It is a rath, the most common type of ringfort, which in its simplest form is an enclosed circular or subcircular area defined by one or more earthen banks, used during the early medieval period primarily as a defended farmstead.

This particular rath is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 30 metres in diameter, and survives in fair condition, its defining bank still legible in the ground. A gap on the north-eastern side, roughly 3.4 metres wide, may represent the original entrance, which is significant because so many sites of this type have been altered or damaged over the centuries, with later field improvements and agricultural activity obscuring their original form. If the gap is indeed original, it would have been the point through which people, animals, and goods passed in and out of the enclosed farmstead, facing towards the north-east in a manner seen at a number of other ringforts across the country.