What survives at Curraghkiely is a quiet anomaly in the Irish agricultural landscape: a roughly circular earthwork that has outlasted the society that built it by well over a thousand years, and whose interior now bears the traces of an entirely different kind of land use. The site is a rath, the most common type of Irish ringfort, typically a defended farmstead of the early medieval period enclosed by one or more earthen banks. Here, the enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring about 33.5 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, and it sits on a north-facing slope in a way that gives the bank an uneven profile: on the downslope northern side the internal height is only around 0.2 metres, while on the uphill southern side it rises to about 0.6 metres internally and just over a metre on the outside. The bank itself is built of earth and stone and ranges between 3.5 and 4.5 metres wide.

The entrance, 3.2 metres across, faces east-south-east, an orientation not unusual for ringforts, which often opened towards the morning sun. Notably, there is no visible fosse, the surrounding ditch that typically accompanies such a bank and from which the upcast material was dug. Its absence might mean the ditch was never dug here, or that centuries of slippage and cultivation have filled it in beyond recognition. What the interior does preserve, perhaps unexpectedly, are lazy beds, the ridged cultivation strips associated with potato growing, most likely from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. It is a small collision of eras: an early medieval enclosure pressed into service for post-medieval subsistence farming, and the evidence of both still legible in the grass.