The rath at Cloonlara, a ringfort of the kind that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, was originally a roughly circular raised platform, measuring about 26.5 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west. A ringfort or rath was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a defended homestead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is not its size or preservation but its afterlife: at some point, whoever farmed the land immediately to its south simply absorbed it. The fosse, the wide defensive ditch that ran around the outside of the bank, was pressed into service as a trackway. The external bank beside it was reverted with drystone facing on its inner slope and became a field fence. Parts of the outer bank were removed altogether, or buried under collapsed field walls running at angles that have nothing to do with the original design.

The traces of that later occupation are themselves now ruinous. A small stone-built vernacular building leans against the outer face of the external bank at the south-southwest, and the farmstead it belonged to, immediately south of the rath, has fallen into ruin. So the site holds two layers of abandonment: the original early medieval enclosure, and the agricultural reuse that partly dismantled it. The external bank, where it survives, remains quite substantial, rising to around 1.7 metres on the exterior at the east and south-southwest, its apparent height boosted by the natural slope of the ridge. At the southeast of the interior, a gap about three metres wide with a ramp-like approach and a large flanking stone on the south side may preserve the original entrance to the rath. A straight scarp cutting across the eastern interior is more likely a product of later modification than anything original. Around 130 metres to the west-southwest lies a second possible rath, suggesting this ridge was a place people chose to settle more than once.