The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one has reached a particular condition: the earthen bank that once defined its roughly twenty-metre diameter is now so heavily overgrown as to make the interior largely inaccessible, and the external fosse, a defensive ditch encircling the bank, has flooded and widened to the point where it functions more as a moat than an archaeological feature. The northern side has accumulated rubbish over time, which says something about how the site is regarded locally, or at least how it has been treated in recent decades.

The basic form here is typical of its type. A rath would originally have enclosed a family farmstead, the bank and fosse offering a degree of protection for livestock and inhabitants alike. What survives at Curraghgorm is the skeleton of that arrangement: the circular plan still readable at around twenty metres across, the surrounding earthwork still present even if nature has largely reclaimed it. The flooding of the fosse suggests the site sits in ground that holds water, which, combined with the pasture setting and the unchecked growth of vegetation across the bank, has left it in a state that is as much ecological as archaeological.