What looks like a modest earthen bank along its southern edge turns out, on closer inspection, to be nothing more ancient than spoil from a nearby farm building. Strip that away mentally, and what remains is a raised area roughly 24 metres across, defined by a scarp only about 20 centimetres high, the quietly eroded remnant of a rath.

A rath is a type of ringfort, a circular enclosure typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead. Thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation. The Curraleigh example was already well enough established in the landscape to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured oval enclosure measuring approximately 40 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west. That larger footprint likely reflects the original outer extent of the earthworks, while the 24-metre raised platform visible today represents what survives above ground after centuries of agricultural use. The site sits in tillage, which goes some way to explaining the low profile of the surviving scarp. Repeated ploughing over generations has a habit of softening and reducing earthworks that might otherwise be more pronounced.

Perhaps the most intriguing detail is the possible souterrain recorded in the north-east quadrant of the site. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically built from stone, and commonly associated with early medieval ringforts across Ireland, where they may have served for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Whether the one at Curraleigh is intact, partially collapsed, or only tentatively identified from surface evidence is not confirmed, but its presence, if verified, would suggest the site was once a functioning settlement rather than a purely symbolic enclosure.