The raised area measures roughly 48 metres north to south and 51 metres east to west, enclosed by an earthen bank that rises only about 30 centimetres at its highest. That modest profile is easy to dismiss as a natural undulation, which is part of why so many of these sites go unnoticed by people who walk past them regularly.

This is a rath, the earthwork form of an Irish ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied broadly across the early medieval period, from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation, representing the basic unit of rural settlement for much of that era. At Creggarve, the bank has been levelled along its north-eastern to south-eastern arc, damage attributed to quarrying at some point in the site's post-medieval history. The interior is heavily overgrown, which both obscures the ground surface and, in a practical sense, protects whatever subsurface archaeology may remain beneath it.