Sitting on a gentle south-westerly slope in pastureland at Toberclare, this ringfort belongs to a type known as bivallate, meaning it was enclosed not by one but by two concentric earthen banks with a ditch, or fosse, running between them. That double-ring arrangement was an architectural choice that set certain settlements apart, and this example has held its shape remarkably well across more than a thousand years of agricultural use.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was a roughly circular enclosure of raised earthen banks used as a defended farmstead, most commonly during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Toberclare example was formally described in 1971 and 1976, and the recorded measurements give a sense of the original engineering involved. The circular interior measures thirty-three metres across. The inner bank survives to between one and one and a half metres in height and is still substantially intact, aside from wear on either side of the causewayed entrance on the east side, where a gap was left in both bank and fosse to allow passage in and out. The fosse itself is wide and U-shaped, measuring over six metres across at the base, and the corresponding causeway over it reaches about four metres in width at the top. A second, outer bank is still visible along the eastern and south-eastern arc of the site. Along the southern and south-westerly sections, however, that outer bank has been absorbed into a curvilinear field fence, its earthwork quietly repurposed by later farming practice. Inside the inner bank, there is a shallow depression near the north-north-west, suggesting some disturbance at some point, and the interior floor carries faint cultivation ridges running north to south, the traces of medieval or post-medieval tillage on what is now open pasture.