The ringfort here is modest enough on the surface, a circular enclosure about forty metres across, defined by an earthen bank that rises less than a metre at its highest point. But attached to it, now infilled and sealed, was a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind early medieval communities built beneath or beside their settlements, most likely for storage, refuge, or both. That buried chamber is gone from access now, leaving only the earthwork above ground to mark what was once a functioning farmstead, probably of early medieval date.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they take this earthen form, were the most common type of rural settlement in Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but each one represents what was once a family's home, their livestock enclosure, and the boundary of their immediate world. The Cloongowla example sits in the landscape quietly, its southern and western arc overgrown, its south-western edge interrupted where later field fences have been built across the bank. The souterrain associated with it has been recorded but is no longer accessible, having been filled in at some point, a fate that has befallen many such features across the country as farming practices changed and the ground above was put to other uses.