What makes this site particularly curious is not its age but its apparent afterlife: the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map depicts it as a subcircular earthwork with a perforated line and tree planting, strongly suggesting that at some point after 1700 it was repurposed as a tree-ring, one of those decorative or shelter plantings that Anglo-Irish landowners commonly laid out on earlier mounds and earthworks, perhaps unaware, or perhaps entirely aware, of what lay beneath.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically consisting of a roughly circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and housing a family and their livestock. The Cloghanstown example measures approximately 49 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 41 metres on its north-east to south-west axis. A scarp, the internal face of the enclosing bank, survives well on the southern, western, and northern sides, though it fades to little more than a gentle swelling in the ground to the north-east and east. A shallow fosse, the outer ditch that would have accompanied the bank, can still be traced on the western side. No clear entrance survives, though the natural ground slope rising towards the eastern perimeter suggests the gap may once have been there. By the time the revised Ordnance Survey was published in 1913, the map recorded it as a penannular earthwork, open to the east, a shape consistent with a partly degraded ringfort whose eastern arc had by then largely disappeared. The interior rises from the edges towards a roughly level central area, a typical characteristic of these monuments. Today, aerial photography picks up only a faint oval cropmark where the levelled sections once stood, the buried ditches and disturbed soils betraying themselves in the differential growth of grass above.