The outer boundary of that ancient enclosure has not disappeared; it survives as a scarp, a pronounced earthen scarping or drop in the ground, running roughly west to east and rising to about 2.4 metres in height, with a stone wall of 1.6 metres added along its crest to serve the later churchyard. What was once the perimeter of a family's defended farmstead has become, almost seamlessly, the wall of a sacred precinct.

The 1904 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the arc of the original rath as a hachured curve, opening west to east, with St. Michael's Roman Catholic church already occupying its interior. A straight east-west stone wall, around 30 metres long, closes off the southern side of the semicircular churchyard, completing the enclosure that the old earthwork only half provides. A farm trackway still runs along the outside of the scarp to the north and east, following a line that may itself be very old. The relationship between early ringforts and later ecclesiastical sites is not unusual in Ireland; churches were frequently established within or beside pre-existing enclosures, perhaps because the ground already carried a sense of boundary and significance. What makes Cooldorragha particularly interesting is how legibly that layering can still be read in the landscape. To the south of the site, in an adjacent field, a souterrain has been recorded alongside an ogham stone. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement and used for storage or refuge, while ogham stones carry inscriptions in an early Irish script of notched lines. Their presence just outside the old rath boundary reinforces the sense of a site that was active and significant long before any church was built here.