The site at Gorteen sits on a north-facing slope of soft pasture, and it takes a moment for the eye to read the landscape correctly, to separate the low curves of earthwork from the ordinary undulations of the ground.

The structure is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied predominantly between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, when they served as the homesteads of farming families across the Irish countryside. This particular example measures thirty-two metres in diameter and is defined by two concentric earthen banks with a fosse, that is, a ditch, running between them. The inner bank is low and broad, around five and a half metres wide, while the outer bank stands somewhat taller on its interior face at one metre. A wide gap of seven metres in the outer bank at the south-south-east likely marks the original entrance. A second, shallower external fosse is faintly visible at the south-west and north-west. The interior is level and grassed over. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with notes uploaded in August 2011. By that point, a field boundary that the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map showed encircling the entire enclosure had already been removed, though a north-south field boundary on the western side still cuts across the outer fosse, a small, legible sign of how agricultural use has quietly pressed against these older earthworks over generations.

The site lies in open farmland, so access would depend on landowner permission, as is customary with monuments of this kind in rural Ireland. Because the earthworks are subtle, particularly the inner bank which rises only forty centimetres above the interior floor, a visit in low winter light or early morning, when raking shadows define shallow ground features more clearly, will reward the effort considerably more than a flat summer afternoon. Looking from the outside in, the outer bank reads most clearly from the south, where the entrance gap interrupts the circuit and gives a sense of the original approach to the enclosure.