The enclosure measures roughly 34 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, and what survives is best traced along its northern and southern arcs, where the original bank has held its shape a little longer against the levelling pressure of agricultural land use. A second ringfort of the same type lies only about 100 metres to the north-west, suggesting this was once a more populated stretch of early medieval landscape than it might appear today.

A ringfort, or rath, is the most common monument type in Ireland, a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period roughly between 500 and 1000 AD as a farmstead or place of residence for a family of some local standing. This particular example at Rathordan was already being mapped in 1840, appearing on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch series as a roughly circular feature defined by a bank, a depiction repeated on the revised edition surveyed between 1952 and 1954. In 1954 an Ordnance Survey team produced a sketch plan and cross-sections of the monument. By 1982, when a researcher named Cahill examined it for an unpublished thesis, the rath still retained one bank and one ditch and was considered to be in fair condition, though the subsequent decades of agricultural activity appear to have reduced what is visible above ground further still.