What makes it quietly compelling is how much of its original structure survives alongside the evidence of everything that has worked against it: quarrying, field-wall construction, clearance work, and the slow pressure of agricultural life across many generations.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They usually consisted of a raised circular or oval area surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and served as the dwelling place of a farming family and their livestock. The Cloonmore example is a slightly raised oval measuring approximately 32.7 metres east to west and 42.3 metres north to south. It retains a stony earthen inner bank, a fosse (the surrounding ditch, here some four metres wide on the western side), and an external bank beyond that. The western arc is the best-preserved section, where large stones protruding along the base of the internal slope appear to be remnants of original stone kerbing. The fosse and outer bank remain reasonably intact from the southeast around to the north-northwest, but on the northeastern arc they have been levelled entirely, leaving a flat, berm-like gap about ten metres wide, its outer edge marked only by a low scarp. A field wall running roughly north to south has been built directly over the levelled outer bank on the eastern side, making visible the moment when agricultural convenience overtook the monument. The interior surface is uneven and slopes downward from the centre toward the east, where a gap in the bank may mark the position of the original entrance. Portions of the inner bank's exterior slope on the northern arc have also been quarried out, and a heap of stony field clearance material sits on the line of the levelled outer bank at the northeast.

Access to the interior is currently made through an eroded break at the southwest, a practical gap worn into the bank that now serves in place of whatever formal entrance once existed on the eastern side.