The raised circular interior, roughly 27 metres across, is enclosed by a substantial earthen bank, and a break in the bank at the east-south-east is thought to mark the original entrance. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from around 500 to 1000 AD, where a single family or small community lived within a defended circular space. The bank at Aghatotan is still present, but only the northern arc retains any clear trace of the outer ditch, or fosse, that would once have reinforced it.

What distinguishes this particular site is less what survives than what has happened to it. The bank has been modified over time and absorbed into the surrounding field system, so that the boundary between an early medieval monument and a working agricultural landscape is now genuinely blurred. A modern roadway clips the site from the west-south-west to the west-north-west, and a drainage trench runs alongside it, both cutting into or around the monument in ways that have reshaped its edges and obscured its original footprint. This layering of use, early medieval, post-medieval field management, and twentieth-century infrastructure, is common across rural Ireland, but seldom quite so legible in a single small site. The fosse, barely traceable now across most of the circuit, survives only in that north-western to north-eastern arc, suggesting the rest has been levelled or filled in across centuries of agricultural activity.