The form is oval rather than the more typical circle, measuring roughly 27 metres on its longer axis and 24 metres across, and the difference between the interior and exterior height of the surrounding bank, 0.5 metres on the inside and 1.3 metres on the outside, gives a sense of how such structures were designed to present a more imposing face to the world beyond rather than to tower over the people living within.

A rath is an earthen enclosure, usually constructed during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and serving most often as a defended farmstead for a single family and their livestock. Thousands once dotted the Irish landscape, and while many have been ploughed out or built over across the centuries, this example at Clogheenmilcon retains enough of its original form to read clearly in the ground. The bank survives to the north, east, and south, where a natural or cut scarp takes over along the western side. A southern entrance, about 3.4 metres wide, still breaks the line of the bank at what would have been the main point of access. Somewhere along the way, a field fence was built against the outer face of the bank to the northwest, folding the ancient boundary into the working landscape of a later era, as so often happens with these sites.

The interior and bank are heavily overgrown with ferns and some scrubby bushes, which makes the structure easier to feel underfoot than to see clearly. The surrounding strip of ground appears similarly untended, meaning the site sits slightly apart from the managed fields nearby, preserved less by intention than by neglect.