The site at Curraghturk is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation, but many, like this one, have been absorbed so thoroughly into the working landscape that they are now more visible on satellite imagery than they are on the ground.

The earliest cartographic record of the site appears on the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map of 1840, where it is annotated with the placename Parkalassa and drawn as a circular enclosure. By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch edition was produced in 1897, surveyors recorded it as oval in outline, measuring approximately 27 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around 20 metres north-west to south-east, with a bank still visible around its perimeter. A curving field boundary had by then been laid across the northern to south-eastern arc of the monument, a familiar fate for earthworks that survived long enough to become useful as ready-made field divisions. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the national sites database in October 2021, drawing on Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, which show the overgrown outline of the bank still holding its shape beneath the vegetation.

Accessing the site requires crossing wet pasture, so the ground underfoot will be soft for much of the year, and the monument itself offers little to see at eye level given the degree of overgrowth. The best way to orient yourself before visiting is to study the aerial images available through Google Earth, which make the elliptical bank clearly legible against the surrounding field patterns. The plantation immediately to the north provides a useful landmark. The placename Parkalassa, recorded on the 1840 map, is itself worth noting; Parc, from the English word park in its older sense of an enclosed field, combined with a personal or local name, hints at how the site was understood by local communities long before any formal archaeological record was made of it.