The ringfort that stood here, a rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen or earth-and-stone bank, has been levelled. Its outline was still clear enough to be mapped as an embanked enclosure of approximately sixty metres in diameter on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. Today, the enclosure exists only as a faint signature in the land, a low rise and a slight scarp tracing an arc across the grass where the bank and its accompanying fosse, an external ditch, once stood.

Ringforts are among the most common monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country. They served primarily as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and the bank and fosse combination was a standard means of demarcating and defending a household's space. The example at Templeathea West appears to have followed that pattern, with local information indicating a single earth-and-stone bank fronted by an external fosse. More intriguing is the local tradition that the interior once contained a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or refuge, though Denis Power, who compiled the site record uploaded in August 2011, found no surface trace of such a feature remaining. Aerial photographs taken in April 2006 for the Archaeological Survey of Ireland were also consulted during assessment.

The site sits in open pasture with views down into the valley of the River Galey, and what remains is genuinely subtle. The enclosing element survives to a height of no more than about thirty centimetres in its most pronounced section, with a width of roughly 6.8 metres, and elsewhere reduces to a scarp of around twenty centimetres. The interior, measuring approximately 58 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, has a noticeably uneven surface that slopes gently southward. Visitors with an eye for slight changes in ground level, particularly in low, raking light in the early morning or late afternoon, will have the best chance of reading the outline. The site is on private farmland, so any visit would require the landowner's permission.