This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, home to a single family and their livestock, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most survive only as low earthen banks like this one, their original timber buildings long gone, the enclosed space now given over to grass and the occasional hawthorn.

The Coonealmore rath sits in a shallow east-west stream valley, tucked at the base of a gentle south-facing slope, with a canalised drain running immediately to its south and marking the boundary of the townland. The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring about 21 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, and is defined by a degraded earthen bank that survives best on its outer, southern face, where the external height reaches around 1.2 metres. Internally, the bank has been worn down to little more than a low lip, and on the east-south-east and west-north-west arcs it is reduced to a barely perceptible scarp. A band of rushes running around the north-east arc hints at a fosse, the shallow ditch that typically accompanied such banks, though if one existed here it has been filled in and can no longer be traced around the full circuit. Inside, the ground is level, with a shallow circular depression of about two metres in diameter just south of centre, the origin of which is unclear. A two-metre gap in the bank at the east is likely the original entrance, a common placement that would have faced the morning light and the more open view along the valley floor.