A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, typically built during the Early Medieval period as a farmstead or place of refuge. At Garragort, the enclosure measured around thirty metres across and held its form clearly enough to be mapped in 1842, then again in 1905, and again in 1937. Each of those Ordnance Survey editions recorded the same hachured circle in the same spot on the slope, the land falling steeply away to the north and south around it.

By the time Bowman described it in 1934, the fort was still legible in the ground. Writing it up as a single-ramparted enclosure of roughly 46 yards in diameter on the land of a James O'Callaghan, Bowman noted a bank standing about five feet high, a fosse, or outer ditch, of two to four feet in depth, and an interior that sat roughly four feet above the level of the surrounding field. Those are not insignificant dimensions, suggesting a site that had survived agricultural pressure for at least a millennium before the twentieth century. Something else lurks here too: a possible souterrain in the south-western quadrant. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, often stone-lined, associated with Early Medieval settlement and variously interpreted as a place of storage, refuge, or both.

What happened to the bank after Bowman's visit is bluntly recorded. Local information indicates it was levelled around 1982, and what the Ordnance Survey mappers traced three times across nearly a century is now reduced to a low rise on the western side of the enclosure, the only surface trace of what the bank once was. The interior and the slope that gave the site its defensive logic remain, but the structure itself has largely gone back into the ground.