It has eaten into the inner bank and the fosse, the encircling ditch, leaving the monument's north and east sides visibly disrupted.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands. They were typically built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads for single family groups. The one at Rathordan follows the familiar circular plan, measuring approximately twenty-eight metres east to west and twenty-six metres north to south. It is defined by an inner earthen bank and an outer fosse to the east and north-north-west, with a second, outer bank running roughly east-south-east to west-north-west. A causewayed entrance, that is, an unexcavated strip of ground left across the fosse to allow passage, opens at the south-south-west and measures four metres across. The outer bank, which survives reasonably well in places, has been cut through by a later field boundary along the northern and eastern sectors, a fate that has befallen countless Irish ringforts as agricultural land was reorganised in the centuries following their abandonment.

What distinguishes Rathordan from many comparable sites is not age or scale but the combination of two separate episodes of interference: the field boundary slicing through the outer earthworks, and the substantial quarrying in the north-east interior. Together they give the monument an almost archaeological quality of its own, with the later disturbances layered visibly on top of the earlier construction, each one a different era's indifference to what came before.