The raised area measures 28 metres north to south and is defined by an earthen bank that stands roughly a metre high on its interior face and nearly two metres on the exterior, a modest but deliberate difference that tells you something about the effort that went into its original construction. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is the survival of some of its stonework: a section of external revetment, a gateway, and steps to the north, along with remains of stone facing in the bank to the south-west.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built primarily from earth and banks rather than stone, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed homesteads, the bank and ditch combination offering a degree of protection for a farming family and their livestock rather than functioning as military fortifications in any serious sense. This one in Kilgobnet preserves something rarer than the earthwork itself: architectural detail. The external stone revetment, where a drystone wall reinforces the outer face of the bank, survives along the north-north-west to south-east arc, and the gateway with its associated steps suggests the original entrance was a considered, structured feature rather than a simple gap in the bank. There may also be a souterrain beneath the interior, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that early medieval communities used for storage or as a place of refuge, though its presence here has not been confirmed definitively.