What survives is so faint that only the slightest trace of an enclosing fosse, the defensive ditch that would once have ringed the site, marks out a roughly circular area of about 41 metres across. The earthwork has been so thoroughly levelled that it became properly visible only in a cropmark, the ghost impression left in vegetation above buried features, captured in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011. That photograph revealed what centuries of agricultural activity had reduced to near invisibility at ground level.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of enclosed rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were used primarily as farmsteads, and tens of thousands once dotted the landscape. The example at Galmoylestown sits on a gentle south-south-east facing slope of a high hill, with open views across the surrounding countryside to the north-east, east, south, and west. That commanding position on the hillside would have made it a practical and well-situated enclosure in its time. A concave depression in the southern quadrant of the interior is not the remnant of any original feature, but rather the scar left by later quarrying activity. A separate earthwork lies roughly 200 metres to the north-west, suggesting this was not an isolated presence in the landscape but part of a broader pattern of early settlement across the hill.