That act of severance is, in its own way, the most telling thing about the site at Derrygorman. The earthwork survived remarkably well on either side of the tarmac, but the road almost certainly destroyed whatever original entrance once faced outward from the enclosure's perimeter, leaving three gaps in the banks that are considered secondary, later intrusions rather than any part of the original design.

A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more raised banks and a fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for building those banks. The Derrygorman example sits on level ground and spans 49 metres in internal diameter, which places it at the larger end of the typical range. Its enclosure consists of an earthen inner bank and fosse, with an outer bank surviving along the eastern half only. That outer bank reaches 1.5 metres above the bottom of the fosse and is 1.3 metres wide; at the western side, the inner bank rises 3 metres above the fosse floor and extends 6 metres in width, suggesting it was built with some care and intention. Parts of the fosse's outer edge are faced with stone, and a section of the northeastern bank has been replaced by a stone wall at some point, though the surrounding earthwork is thought to be largely original. Within the interior, two possible hut-sites have been identified. One, in the western half, is marked by a low band of collapsed stone enclosing a roughly square area of about 5.2 metres across. The other lies to the north of the western entrance gap and survives as a circular hollow now heavily overgrown. A trench to the south of the same gap may represent a later drainage cut. The site was documented by J. Cuppage as part of the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which catalogued the extraordinary density of early settlement remains across the Corca Dhuibhne landscape.