What makes it worth a second look is not its size or grandeur but the layers of interference written into its earthwork, each generation of use or neglect leaving its mark on a structure that was already ancient when the first Ordnance Survey mappers came through.

The monument is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts generally consisted of a circular or subcircular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, with a single entrance gap in the perimeter. At Curraghmore, that original entrance has long since disappeared, and the rath's roughly subcircular form, measuring approximately 30 metres northwest to southeast and 26 metres northeast to southwest, has been significantly altered over time. A quarried hole breaks through the southern perimeter, and a modern curvilinear bank with an accompanying trench has been inserted against the inner face of the original bank along the southern and southwestern arc. Whether the wide shallow depression running around the western and northwestern base of the outer scarp represents a partly silted fosse, the external ditch that would have originally accompanied the bank, is genuinely unclear; it connects to modern trenching and may be nothing older than recent agricultural activity. Modern field banks have replaced the original perimeter along the northern arc, and a field fence cuts across the earthwork at the east-southeast. The monument appeared on the revised 1913 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map as an irregular earthwork, and by 1970 it was already described as much disturbed. At the centre of the interior, a roughly circular depression about 4.5 metres in diameter sits on a gentle northwest-facing slope, its origin unrecorded.

From the air, the site reads as an oval patch of trees set into open pasture, and the rise on which it sits offers long views to the east, south, west, and northwest, a reminder that whoever built the original enclosure chose their ground carefully. The higher ground to the north and northeast would have overlooked the site, a detail that sits slightly awkwardly with any straightforward reading of the location as a defensive one, and perhaps points instead toward the social and agricultural functions that most ringforts are now thought to have served.