It does not announce itself dramatically; the earthen bank on the eastern to west-north-western arc still stands to about 1.4 metres, enough to register as deliberate and ancient, while the opposite stretch has been worn almost flat, surviving now only as a faint rise in the pasture grass. The whole enclosure measures roughly 36 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, a broadly circular form that is immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the ringfort tradition of early medieval Ireland.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the dominant settlement type in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. They functioned primarily as farmsteads, the enclosing bank and any accompanying ditch serving to define a household's space and protect livestock from wolves and opportunistic theft rather than to repel organised military attack. Tens of thousands once existed across the island, though centuries of agricultural improvement, land clearance, and simple neglect have reduced or obliterated a great many of them. The example at Curragh sits in what is now open pasture, which has both preserved its outline and rendered it inconspicuous, a low swell of ground that grazing animals move across without ceremony, largely indifferent to what lies beneath the soil.