A low circular platform, roughly fifty metres across, is defined by a deep fosse, the term for the ditch that typically surrounds a ringfort, with a narrow stone-faced earthen bank beyond it. Parts of that bank have been folded into the surrounding field fence system. What had already been partly quarried away was finally levelled in June 1989, erasing a site that Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 through to 1935 had consistently recorded as a substantial circular enclosure, later mapped as bivallate, meaning it once had two concentric banks or ditches rather than one.

The historical associations attached to this place are considerably larger than what survives on the ground. Cloghleafin townland has been identified with a place called Liathmuine, given in tradition as the home of St Molaga, an early Irish saint. The same site is linked, in scholarship from the early twentieth century, to a local chieftain named Cuana mac Calchine, described in older sources as renowned throughout Ireland for his prodigal hospitality. A researcher writing in 1932 concluded that the great lios, the ringfort enclosure, near the north-west angle of the townland was most likely the princely residence of Cuana himself. Early hagiographical tradition holds that St Molaga and his parents were brought to the royal dun at Cloghleafin, and that the child grew to adolescence there. A dun, in early Irish usage, denotes a fortified residence of some status, and the scale of the enclosure as recorded, around fifty metres across with a deep surrounding fosse, is consistent with a site of local importance. That the physical remains were largely destroyed within living memory makes the convergence of saint, chieftain, and townland name here all the more quietly striking.