The roughly oval enclosure, measuring approximately 43 metres across its widest axis, has been worn down to the point where only portions of it remain legible on the ground. A bank survives along the southern and south-western arc, while elsewhere the enclosing element has been reduced to a scarp, a low natural-looking step in the earth that only reveals its artificial origins on closer inspection.

Raths, also known as ringforts, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or subcircular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were used as farmsteads from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Cloonykeevan example has not fared especially well. A field boundary cuts through the monument at both the north-east and south-south-east, and east of that boundary no surface trace of the original enclosure survives at all. Quarrying has also eaten into the south-western edge of the site, compounding the losses. What remains is fragmentary, the outline of a place rather than the place itself. One further detail gives the site a quiet geographic interest: another rath lies approximately 95 metres to the south-west, suggesting that this small corner of Galway was once a settled and inhabited landscape, its farms sitting within comfortable distance of one another.