It is not a dramatic ruin or a celebrated monument, but the kind of everyday archaeological survival that is easy to walk past without registering what it actually represents. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular enclosure built during the early medieval period, most commonly between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, and served as a farmstead, offering a defended living space for a family and their livestock. Thousands were built across Ireland, and this one at Gorteanish is a quietly legible example of the type.

The enclosure is nearly circular, measuring 23.1 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. An earthen bank, rising to about 1.2 metres, runs from the south-east around to the north, and this bank retains some stone facing in places, suggesting that whoever constructed or maintained it made use of locally available material to shore up the earthwork. For the rest of its circuit, the boundary drops to a lower scarp of around 0.6 metres. Outside the bank, there would originally have been a fosse, a defensive ditch encircling the whole, though this has long since silted up and is no longer clearly visible as a cut feature. The bank itself is broken in two places, to the south-west and the north-west, though whether these gaps are original entrances, later field modifications, or simple collapse is not recorded.