Locally it goes by the name Flaherty's Fort, a designation recorded by Neary as far back as 1914, and the survival of that vernacular name says something about how these monuments embed themselves in the memory of a townland long after their physical form has been compromised.

A rath, to give it its more technical name, is a roughly circular enclosure of earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period in Ireland and typically associated with a single farmstead or a family of some local standing. This one sits on a north-facing slope of a low rise amid what is otherwise flat, low-lying grassland, and at its most intact measures approximately 50.5 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west, making it a reasonably substantial example of its type. Two banks with an intervening fosse, which is simply a ditch, originally defined the full circuit, though from the east-south-east, sweeping around through the south and across to the west, no surface trace of those enclosing elements now survives. Only a short section of the fosse between east-south-east and south-south-east remains visible. On the north-west to north-east arc, a later field bank has been laid directly over the outer bank, absorbing it into the more prosaic geometry of agricultural land management. Roughly 300 metres to the east-south-east lies a separate enclosure, suggesting this part of Carrowkeel held some degree of early settlement activity beyond a single isolated farmstead.