The ringfort at Coolknedane has been quietly absorbed into the field system around it, with part of its enclosing bank pressed into service as a field fence, the boundary of an Early Medieval farmstead doing double duty as an agricultural boundary centuries after anyone last lived within it. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular earthen enclosure, home to a single farming family in early medieval Ireland, its bank and external ditch providing both a boundary and a degree of protection for people and livestock.

The site sits on a north-facing slope in the corner of a field, measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. Where the bank survives most clearly, on the northern and eastern sides, it rises to about two metres on its outer face, though only about 0.6 metres on the interior, suggesting the original ground level inside the enclosure was higher than it now appears, or simply that the outer face was built up more steeply. The accompanying fosse, the external ditch that would have defined the outer edge of the enclosure, is still visible to the northwest and north-northeast, reaching a depth of around 0.7 metres. Elsewhere the enclosure announces itself only as a low undulation in the grass surrounded by a faint depression, the kind of thing that rewards a slow walk and a low sun. From within, or what was within, there is a clear view north to the Galtee Mountains, a range that straddles the Cork and Tipperary border, which may or may not have mattered to whoever chose this particular slope as a place to settle.