What remains is enough to read the original intention: a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, defined by two raised banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them, tracing an arc from the south-west, around the west, and continuing to the north-east.

Ringforts were the dominant settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most were farmsteads, enclosing a family's dwelling and outbuildings behind earthen banks that offered a degree of security and a clear boundary of ownership. This example at Corrabaun measures approximately 23.7 metres north to south and 21.9 metres east to west, making it a fairly modest specimen. Its double-bank construction with an intervening fosse would have given it a more imposing profile in its original state than a simpler single-banked enclosure, suggesting the household it protected may have held some local standing. The surviving arc runs for rather less than half the circuit; elsewhere, the earthworks have either been absorbed into later field boundaries or levelled entirely, leaving no surface trace.

What makes this particular site quietly telling is precisely that accumulation of later interference. The field wall that cuts across the monument at both north and south, and the shed built directly over the eastern enclosing elements, are not unusual fates for ringforts in agricultural landscapes. Thousands of similar sites across Ireland have been partially or wholly erased by the ordinary pressures of farming over centuries. Corrabaun survives in what surveyors describe as fair condition, which in this context means enough of the double bank and fosse remains legible on the ground to understand what was once there, even as the eastern third of the enclosure has effectively been built over and the rest interrupted by stonework laid down by hands that may not have known, or may not have cared, what lay beneath.