Modern buildings press close from the north-east and south, field boundaries have swallowed portions of its outer bank, and roughly half the site has been levelled. What remains is still legible enough to be worth pausing over, but only just.

A rath, as this type of monument is sometimes called, is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosure at Killyvaghan was once a fairly substantial example: a raised circular area with an interior diameter of 31.4 metres, defended by two concentric earthen banks separated by a fosse, the term for a defensive ditch dug between the banks. The outer bank has been modified and folded into the field boundary along its western, northern, and eastern arc. The fosse itself survives only in the northern half of the site, and even there it is poorly defined. The southern portion of the whole structure has been levelled, and the original entrance, which in better-preserved examples often faces east, can no longer be identified. What the site communicates now is less the presence of something than the outline of an absence; a form that has been slowly dismantled by successive generations of agricultural and domestic use without ever being entirely removed.