The rath at Cleedagh is more elaborately defended than that. It sits on a low hill in pasture and presents two concentric earthen banks with a fosse, a ditch dug between them for drainage and defence, separating them. A second, outer fosse is traceable to the south and south-west, though it has been partly infilled over the centuries. The whole enclosure measures about 32 metres across its north-south axis, and both banks retain traces of stone-facing, the inner one on its interior side and the outer one on its exterior, suggesting the builders were not relying on earthwork alone to hold the structure together. A later stone wall, perhaps a metre high, was added along the top of the inner bank between the west-south-west and north-west. The entrance breaks through both banks on the east side, as was common, and in the north-west quadrant there is an opening into a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that would have served for storage or concealment.

By the time of the Ordnance Survey in the 1840s, the site was being called Cliddagh Fort and was noted as lying on the boundary at the southern end of Cleedagh townland, in the parish of Kilcummin. A century later, in the 1940s, it was still prominent enough to be described simply as a great earthen fort with two rings. That double-ring detail, which the later survey measurements confirm, is what separates this rath from the majority of surviving examples. Bivallate raths, those with two banks rather than one, are considerably less common across the Irish landscape and are generally thought to have belonged to people of higher status or greater resources. About 40 metres to the west-south-west, a second rath occupies the same low ground, which raises the possibility that the two enclosures were in some way related, whether as a paired settlement or simply as neighbouring farmsteads making use of the same defensible rise in the land.