The enclosure, roughly circular and measuring some 74 metres across, sits on a south-east-facing slope, its eastern side deliberately raised to level out the ground within, compensating for the natural fall of the hill. That kind of earthwork intervention, modest as it sounds, speaks to a community that intended to occupy this place seriously and for some time.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but what makes the Glanturkin example worth noting is its place within a cluster. Power, writing in 1940, identified five such enclosures within the one townland, referring to them collectively as the "five lioses", a lios being the Irish term for a ringfort with a flat interior. That density of settlement within a single townland hints at sustained occupation, possibly by related farming families, across the early medieval landscape. The enclosing bank here still stands to around 1.3 metres in height along the northern arc, stone-faced in sections, though the southern and western stretches are heavily overgrown. A roadway cuts across the north-western edge, and a stone-faced field fence runs along the north, both of which have absorbed or displaced what might otherwise be a more complete circuit.