It faces north-north-east across flat Limerick pasture, and it is the most human touch in an otherwise earthen landscape: somebody decided this was the way in, and that decision has outlasted almost everything else about the people who made it.

The ringfort at Dunnaman sits 115 metres south-west of the River Maigue, close to the townland boundary with Caherass, in level ground with open views in every direction. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular or oval interior platform surrounded by one or more earthen banks and a fosse, the term for the external ditch dug to create that bank material. This particular example is a substantial one. The 1897 edition of the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map records it as a large oval enclosure with external dimensions of 74 metres north to south and 67 metres east to west, set within a pocket of woodland on the western side of a small stream that marks the townland boundary with Ballynahown. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland inspected the site in 2000, surveyors recorded an interior platform measuring roughly 35 by 30 metres, defined by a flat-topped earthen inner bank, an intervening fosse over a metre deep, and a flat-topped outer bank with an internal height of 1.3 metres. The cobbled entrance at the north-north-east was also noted at that time, along with a small stream running south to north along the base of the outer bank at the eastern side.

By the time Google Earth orthoimages were captured in June 2018 and February 2020, the banks and fosse had become heavily overgrown with trees and shrubs, which makes ground-level inspection considerably more difficult than the survey drawings might suggest. A field boundary runs east to west along the southern edge of the site, skirting the outer bank, and provides a rough guide to orientation. A second ringfort lies approximately 380 metres to the west-north-west, so the broader landscape around Dunnaman carries more of this kind of early medieval activity than a passing glance across the fields would suggest. Winter, when the tree cover is thinnest, gives the best chance of reading the earthworks clearly from the ground.