The ringfort at Gorteenaveela is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 29.5 metres across its northeast to southwest axis, and what survives is a degraded bank of earth and stone that has almost entirely disappeared along its south-southwestern to southwestern arc. Where the bank does remain, it has been breached in several places, the damage appearing modern rather than medieval. A field boundary cuts straight through the monument at its southeastern side, the kind of intrusion that speaks to centuries of agricultural life pressing in around something that no one quite decided to remove.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They typically enclosed a single farmstead, the circular bank and sometimes an outer ditch serving as a boundary against wolves and cattle thieves rather than as a serious military fortification. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but their sheer number has not always protected them from gradual erosion or piecemeal agricultural encroachment. The example at Gorteenaveela is described as being in fair condition, which in the language of field archaeology tends to mean that enough survives to read the form, even if the detail has largely gone. Its published record appears in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. II, covering north Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999.