That combination, a monument within a monument, is what lifts this particular site out of the ordinary run of Irish raths. Ringforts, known in Irish as liosanna or ráithanna, were enclosed farmsteads built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and thousands survive across the Irish countryside. What makes Cloghaneleesh unusual is not the enclosure itself but what someone, at some point, chose to place inside it.

The site is known as Lisnaleagh, or in Irish Lios na Leacht, meaning roughly the ringfort of the mounds of stones, a name that acknowledges the peculiarity directly. It appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1842 under that designation, though by the 1916 edition the name had been dropped. The rath itself is univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank and external fosse (a fosse being the ditch dug to create the bank material), and measures approximately 42 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west internally. It sits on gently rising land, and the interior stands at a noticeably higher level than the surrounding ground. The northern and eastern sections of the bank have been absorbed into later field boundaries and are difficult to read, but elsewhere the earthwork is well preserved, rising to 1.6 metres above the fosse in places. Set into the southern portion of the interior is a rectangular stone enclosure measuring 15 by 20 metres, and within that stands the trio of stone mounds: the northernmost measuring 3.6 by 1.4 metres, the middle one 2.6 by 2 metres, and the largest, to the south, 4.2 by 1.8 metres. Small gaps of roughly a metre wide open through the rectangular enclosure on both its western and eastern sides. Whether the mounds are burial features, clearance cairns, or something else entirely has not been definitively established, but the name the site carried into the nineteenth century suggests the stones were conspicuous and recognised as significant long before any formal survey recorded them.