Levelled long ago by farming activity, the earthwork survives mainly as a shallow ditch, or fosse, tracing an arc through the pasture on an east-south-east-facing slope. The fosse reaches a maximum depth of just 0.6 metres in places, and furze bushes have colonised both its inner and outer edges, forming a ragged living boundary around a circular interior measuring roughly 59 metres across. It is the kind of feature that could easily be walked over without a second thought, yet aerial photography reveals it clearly as a cropmark, the buried bank, fosse, and outer bank showing up as distinct tonal differences in the vegetation above them.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined primarily by earthen banks and ditches rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and fosse providing a degree of security for a family and their livestock. The Templemary example was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as early as 1842, appearing as a hachured circle of approximately 40 metres in diameter. By the 1905 revision the external fosse was being marked explicitly, and the 1937 map shows a slightly smaller measurement of around 35 metres, likely reflecting the progressive erosion of the earthwork over the intervening decades. By the time detailed fieldwork was carried out, the bank itself had been effectively levelled, leaving the fosse as the primary visible indicator of what had once been a complete enclosure. Cultivation ridges crossing the northern half of the interior on an east-south-east to west-north-west axis are a further sign of how thoroughly the site was absorbed into agricultural use after it fell out of its original function.