The earthwork is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD as an enclosed farmstead for a single family or small household. This one at Cloonee is modest in scale, measuring around 34.5 metres in diameter, and time has not been especially kind to it; the bank that once defined its perimeter is poorly preserved, reduced in places to little more than a suggestion in the ground. What stops it being entirely unremarkable, though, is what survives inside.

Within the north-east quadrant of the interior, lazy beds are still visible. Lazy beds are a method of cultivation in which soil and organic material are mounded into parallel ridges, creating raised planting strips separated by drainage channels. The technique was widespread in Ireland for centuries, particularly associated with potato cultivation from the seventeenth century onwards, and the ridges leave a corrugated pattern on the landscape that can persist long after the farming has stopped. Finding them inside an earlier earthwork like this is not unusual, since abandoned ringforts were frequently pressed back into agricultural use during the post-medieval period, their banks offering a degree of shelter and their interiors providing ready ground. At Cloonee, the two layers of land use, early medieval enclosure and later tillage, have settled together quietly into the hillside grassland.