What appears from certain angles to be little more than a grassy terrace reveals itself, on closer inspection, as the remains of a roughly circular enclosure measuring about 26.5 metres across, its interior tilting sharply downhill from north to south, following the natural gradient of the hill rather than working against it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are the most common monument type in the Irish countryside, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and ditch providing security for a household and its livestock rather than any serious military defence. At Curraghmore, the enclosing bank is built from earth and stone, standing about two metres high on its outer face but only around 0.4 metres above the interior ground level, a disparity that reflects the sloping site as much as any later erosion. The bank is three metres wide where it survives, and an external fosse, a shallow ditch roughly two metres across, runs alongside it. Both the bank and the fosse are visible only on the western to northern arc; on the remaining sides, the structure has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a simple break in the slope with no clear upstanding masonry or earthwork to trace. No original entrance can be identified at the surface.