The name was already in use when recorded by Neary in 1914, which suggests it had been the common way of referring to the place for some time before anyone thought to write it down. That kind of informal naming is typical of how ringforts survived in Irish rural memory, absorbed into the landscape and attached to whoever farmed nearby, long after the structures themselves had lost their original significance.

A rath, in the general sense, is a circular earthwork enclosure, usually of early medieval date, defined by a raised bank and an external fosse, which is simply a ditch dug around the outside. This one at Gortaleam measures roughly 32 metres in diameter, which places it at the smaller end of the scale. What survives is poorly preserved: the monument has been quarried out on at least three sides, at the east-north-east, south-east, and west, leaving the bank and fosse only partially readable in the ground. That kind of damage is common enough with raths across Ireland, where the earthworks were treated as a convenient source of stone or levelled to make way for agriculture over the centuries. What the quarrying removes is not just material but the spatial coherence that gives a ringfort its character as an enclosed place.