What survives at Cloonigny is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard form of enclosed rural settlement used by farming families across Ireland roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries. A rath typically consisted of one or more circular earthen banks surrounding a central living area, the whole thing functioning as a demarcated, defensible farmyard. At Cloonigny, the monument is roughly oval, measuring around 36 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south, and it was once defined by two banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them.

The site has not fared well. The outer bank now survives only along the north-western to northern arc, and quarrying has disturbed what remained of the enclosing earthworks at both the north and south. A later field wall, almost certainly laid out with no regard for what lay beneath it, cuts across the monument at the south-west and north-west. This kind of incremental damage is common on low-lying sites in intensively farmed landscapes, where each generation of agricultural improvement chips a little further into structures that were already half-forgotten. What looked like an inconvenient ridge of earth in a pasture field was, a thousand or more years ago, the boundary of someone's home.

There is not much for a visitor to see in any conventional sense. The remains are poorly preserved, and without some familiarity with what to look for, the slight undulations in the grass might read as nothing more than uneven ground. But that tension between the ordinary-looking surface and the long-buried domestic past beneath it is, in its own way, the whole point.