The rath at Cloonty is one of thousands of such sites scattered across Ireland, each one the former farmstead of a family who banked up earth around their home for security and status. This particular example measures roughly thirty metres across in both directions, a fairly typical size, and the basic logic of its construction is still visible to anyone who walks the field.

The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national inventory in August 2011. According to those field notes, the enclosure consists of an earthen bank with an internal height of around 0.8 metres and an external height of 1.8 metres, which gives a sense of how the ground was dug out to raise the bank, rather than simply piled up from imported material. Running along the eastern and northern sides is an external fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of the defensive or boundary arrangement, roughly 1.8 metres wide and 0.4 metres deep. A secondary outer bank, lower and narrower, follows the southeastern to western arc. The interior slopes gently downward to the west beneath its grass cover, and a narrow gap of about one metre in the bank at the north-north-east likely marks the original entrance, a feature common to many raths.

The enclosure now occupies the north-east corner of a field, with modern field boundaries running along its northern and eastern edges and meeting just to its north-east. That positioning is not coincidental; field systems across Ireland have often been laid out to accommodate or avoid these earthworks, which have traditionally been associated with fairy activity and treated with a degree of wariness. Dense overgrowth obscures the bank on the north-eastern to south-eastern stretch and again from the south-west around to the west, so the clearest view of the earthwork's profile is from the eastern and northern sides. A circuit of the perimeter, where vegetation allows, gives the best sense of the fosse and outer bank combination that makes this example slightly more elaborate than the simplest single-banked enclosures.