Here, part of the original earthen bank has been overlain or effectively replaced by a later field boundary running from the north-east around to the south-east, and scrub growth has smothered the circuit from the south-east around to the west-south-west. The result is a monument that has been simultaneously preserved and obscured, folded into the working landscape so gradually that much of it now reads as ordinary hedgerow rather than an enclosure that may be well over a thousand years old.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built from earth rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The Gortnagross example sits on a terrace on a north-facing slope, set within pasture, and forms a roughly circular enclosure measuring around 36 metres east to west. What makes its topography worth noting is the variation in the surviving bank. Surveyed and compiled by Denis Power, with the record uploaded in August 2011, the site shows the bank at its best-preserved between the west-south-west and north-west, where it still stands to an internal height of around 0.3 metres and an external height of 0.45 metres. Moving around to the north-west and north-east, the bank becomes more scarp-like, rising to an external height of 1.3 metres, and the ground outside drops away in a series of steps, suggesting either deliberate construction taking advantage of the natural slope or the effects of centuries of slippage and erosion.

The interior is noticeably uneven and slopes down gently toward the east-north-east. In the eastern quadrant there is an irregular depression measuring roughly 2 metres north to south and 2.5 metres east to west, sunk to a depth of around 0.4 metres; its origin is not specified in the site record. Access is across working pasture, and the dense scrub and tall grasses that cover much of the circuit make a clear circuit of the bank difficult to trace on the ground. The section between the west-south-west and north-west remains the most legible part of the monument, and a field boundary that once abutted the bank's outer face at the north-west has since been removed, leaving that portion of the perimeter slightly more readable than the rest.