A rath, to use the Irish term for this class of monument, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks, built mostly during the early medieval period as a farmstead or high-status residence. This one is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them, and across its roughly circular interior stretching nearly thirty metres north to south, the landscape has been shaped into four descending terraces, each sitting lower than the last as the ground drops away to the south-west. That terracing alone is unusual; it speaks to a deliberate, considered use of a sloping site rather than any simple levelling of ground.

The craftsmanship visible in the stonework adds to that impression of care. The inner bank along its northern upslope sector is faced with coursed drystone masonry, and at the entrance on the east-south-east side, upright slabs line both sides of a two-metre gap through the bank, with taller portal-like slabs marking the inner ends. A causeway crosses the fosse, and a slightly raised trackway extends outward to the east, the ghost of an approach route that once connected this enclosure to whatever lay beyond it. On the terraces inside, the remains of a small rectangular structure sit on the second level, and below it, on the third, are the collapsed foundations of a circular stone hut. That hut was already old enough by the time of the first Ordnance Survey to have acquired the name Cloghaun on the maps, a word derived from the Irish for a small stone structure. There is also a local tradition of a souterrain beneath the site, an underground passage or chamber of a type often associated with early medieval ringforts, though no surface trace of it has been found. An unbonded construction join visible in the stone facing at the east-north-east hints at different phases or hands in the building, a small but telling irregularity in an otherwise carefully assembled structure.