The enclosing bank has been worn down to a scarp barely twenty centimetres high, and a laneway has cut through its western edge, reducing what was once a complete circuit to something more fragmentary. What gives it away, at least from above, is the ghost of a fosse, the external ditch that originally ran around the outside of the bank, visible as a cropmark in aerial photography taken in August 1984.

Ringforts are the most common field monument in Ireland, early medieval farmsteads typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, in which a circular or oval area of ground was enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were the everyday settlements of farming families, and the landscape around Cloghleafin preserves a cluster of them. A possible second ringfort lies around a hundred metres to the southwest, and a circular enclosure of uncertain character sits roughly two hundred metres to the west. Whether these were contemporary or represent different periods of activity is not recorded, but the concentration is telling. This was clearly land that people returned to, organised, and enclosed over generations. The Cloghleafin example itself measures roughly twenty-nine metres north to south and twenty-four metres east to west, an oval footprint that reflects the practical business of enclosing a family compound and its animals against the world outside.