At Gorteen, on a plateau at the edge of a gently south-east-facing slope, a ringfort has been so thoroughly levelled by agriculture that only the most careful eye would separate it from the surrounding improved grassland. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. Here, that enclosure survives as nothing more than a faint oval trace, roughly 30 metres across on one axis and 34 metres on the other, with a bank reduced to a maximum external height of about 0.75 metres and an interior height of just 0.25 metres.

The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1914 to 1916, still recognised this as an earthen fort, which suggests it retained some visible presence in the landscape at that point. Since then, the monument has fared poorly. A farm road cuts directly across its south-west sector, truncating whatever remained of the bank on that side. The interior is gently undulating, with noticeable depressions in the north-east and south-east sectors, which may reflect the footprint of former structures or simply the result of prolonged agricultural disturbance. What makes the site particularly interesting in a wider sense is its setting within a cluster of similar monuments: two further ringforts lie within 190 metres, one to the north-north-west and one to the north-north-east. This kind of close grouping is not unusual in Clare, where early medieval communities sometimes established multiple enclosures in proximity, possibly representing related farmsteads or successive occupation of a favoured plateau.