What remains today is modest in scale but precise in form: a circular enclosure twenty metres across, its bank still standing to about half a metre above the interior, with a fosse, or external ditch, running neatly around the outside. The whole arrangement sits on a gently south-west-facing slope in ordinary pasture, the kind of landscape that gives nothing away.

This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland. Raths were typically the enclosed farmsteads of free farming families, the bank and fosse serving less as serious military defences than as a boundary marking status, keeping livestock in or out, and defining a household's territory within the wider landscape. At Doonally the bank measures roughly 2.8 metres wide and the outer fosse is slightly broader still at 3.6 metres, both maintaining what surveyors describe as a regular profile, meaning they have kept their intended shape rather than slumping or silting into something unreadable. What cannot be determined now is where the original entrance once was. That detail has been lost entirely, which is not unusual; entrances were often simple gaps in the earthwork and are among the first features to disappear under centuries of weathering and agricultural use. The small tracks visible through the bank at several points around the circuit are a later intrusion, worn by livestock moving across the site in the centuries since it was last used as a dwelling.