The rath at Curraghboy sits on a slight natural rise amid gently undulating Westmeath pasture, the kind of midland ground that rolls and dips between wet hollows, and from that modest elevation it once commanded good views in every direction. A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch called a fosse. What survives here is a good deal less than the original builders left behind.

By the time anyone formally described the site in 1971, the enclosing bank had already been worn down to a steep scarp, a low sloping edge rather than anything resembling a proper rampart, and there was no discernible trace of an external fosse at all. The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had recorded the monument as a large oval-shaped area sitting beside a rectangular building to the south-east, so the structure was legible on the landscape into the nineteenth century. The revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition still showed a roughly oval form, approximately 32 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and 23 metres across, with a noticeable indentation on the southern side, most likely the early sign of quarrying activity. That quarrying continued. By the late twentieth century a T-shaped quarry hole had cut through the scarp at both the south and west, and a further portion had been removed at the north-north-east. A large part of the interior is now simply missing. Aerial photography shows a partially tree-planted oval outline, which is often the only way such reduced sites remain identifiable, the vegetation following the ghost of the old bank.