The raised platform measures roughly thirty metres across, and the enclosing earthen bank, around six metres wide, still rises about one and a half metres above the outer ground level. A shallow external fosse, or ditch, runs around the full perimeter, cut to a depth of about half a metre and wide enough at four metres to have made a real impression on anyone approaching without welcome. A probable entrance, just two metres wide, faces south-southwest, the kind of modest gap that would have funnelled movement and made the enclosure easier to control.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, the everyday enclosed settlement of early medieval farming families, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were not primarily military fortifications, though the banks and fosse would have discouraged livestock from wandering and provided a degree of security. The Rooghan example is typical in form but sits in a position that would have offered clear sightlines across the surrounding landscape. Like many of its kind, it has been absorbed into the working countryside over the centuries, and the pressures of that are still visible: a field boundary running roughly south-southwest has truncated the bank, another field boundary cuts across the northern half of the interior, and a forest plantation has encroached on the fosse on the same southern arc. Gorse has colonised parts of the perimeter, softening the earthwork into the rough grazing land around it.