What remains above ground represents only a fragment of what was once a substantial enclosure, and even that fragment requires some patience to read in the landscape.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This example at Garnagale was originally a sizeable one: the 1900 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the northern portion and eastern side of an enclosure measuring roughly 94 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west. On the ground today, the surviving elements run approximately 80 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. The eastern side is the most legible, where a sequence of features can still be traced: an inner bank roughly two metres wide, an infilled fosse or berm (a flat shelf between bank and ditch) of about two and a half metres, and a more substantial outer bank some four metres wide and around one and a half metres high. Beyond that, a band of soft, wet ground hints at the line of a probable outer fosse. A five-metre-wide entrance breaks the eastern side at its midpoint. The bank material is coarse sand and gravel, and much of it is now heavily overgrown with scrub. To the north, only the inner bank survives, running for about twenty metres. The southern and western sides have disappeared entirely at ground level, absorbed into the surrounding pasture.

The site sits just below the western crest of its hillock, positioned to take in views across the rolling grassland in most directions, with a small stream valley opening to the south and south-west. That placement, slightly sheltered from the summit yet commanding the surrounding land, is characteristic of how rath builders often selected their ground.