This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, where a family and their animals lived within a raised earthen boundary that offered a degree of security and social definition as much as outright defence.

The Clone rath is oval in plan, measuring around 32 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 28 metres across the other way. An earthen bank, between 3.3 and 6 metres wide and standing up to 1.3 metres at its highest, traces the perimeter. Outside that bank runs a fosse, which is simply a ditch, here roughly 3.3 metres wide and between 0.2 and 0.6 metres deep. Together the bank and fosse form the classic arrangement seen across thousands of similar sites throughout Ireland. A gap of about 2.8 metres on the western side may represent the original entrance, though no internal features have been identified, leaving the domestic life once carried on within the enclosure to the imagination rather than the archaeological record.