The roughly circular enclosure, measuring about 28 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, now functions as an extension of the farmyard immediately to its south, and its interior has been worn smooth by generations of cattle using it as a passage route to the fields beyond. This is not unusual for Irish ringforts, the most common archaeological monument in the country, but it does make for an oddly intimate relationship between an early medieval settlement enclosure and the agricultural life that has quietly absorbed it.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is essentially a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Gortatlea example retains its earthen bank and the remains of an outer fosse, the ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank. O'Hare's description from 2000 notes that the external face of the bank is largely well preserved, standing to a maximum height of 1.45 metres on the north-north-west side. The internal face tells a different story: while the north and west sections survive reasonably well, the north-east, east, and south-east sections have been badly denuded and trampled by cattle. A gap of over ten metres in the bank on the south-south-west side marks where the farmyard presses directly up against the monument. A narrower break to the north-north-east, around 3.2 metres wide and now closed by a farm gate, is considered probably modern. Faint traces of a slope on the exterior suggest the former outline of the fosse, though it has largely levelled out over time.

What is perhaps most telling about this site is not what survives but what the pattern of survival reveals. The side of the enclosure facing away from the farmyard has weathered the centuries relatively intact, while the portions drawn into daily agricultural use have suffered considerably. It is a small illustration of how proximity to continued human activity can simultaneously preserve a site in the landscape and erode it in the details.