Whatever entrance once served the people who lived here has long since been obscured, leaving a structure that reads, in plan, as something slightly incomplete, a circle interrupted by two modern or post-medieval intrusions at the ENE and NW.

A ringfort, or rath, is a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. They were built to protect a household and its livestock rather than to serve any military purpose, and they survive in their thousands across the Irish landscape. This one at Clonerkin sits on a gentle east- to southeast-facing slope, a practical orientation that would have offered some shelter from prevailing westerly weather. The enclosing bank is composed of earth and stone, measuring between two and two and a half metres wide and standing between sixty centimetres and one and a half metres in height. The interior is roughly circular, approximately twenty-four metres north to south and just under twenty-three metres east to west. There is no sign of a fosse, the external ditch that often accompanies such banks, and no visible internal features survive. What makes the site additionally interesting is its proximity to a second ringfort lying roughly two hundred metres to the northwest. Finding two such enclosures this close together is not unheard of, and may reflect family groupings, successive occupation, or simply the agricultural suitability of the local ground over a long period.