What looks from a distance like a grassy mound turns out, on closer inspection, to be a carefully layered defensive arrangement, its original purpose quietly encoded in the landscape.

The site is a ringfort, a class of enclosed settlement built in Ireland predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, though some examples are older. These were typically the farmsteads of local farming families, their earthen banks and ditches serving as much to define status and contain livestock as to provide serious military defence. The Footstown Little example is circular and grass-covered, measuring approximately fifty metres across its interior from north to south. It is defined by an earthen bank, still standing between two and two and a half metres above the surrounding ground on its outer face, and separated from an outer bank by a rounded fosse, the ditch that would have been excavated to provide material for the banks themselves. That outer bank reaches nearly three metres in height in places, and faint traces of a second outer fosse survive to the north-west and north, giving the whole enclosure a maximum external diameter of around eighty-five metres. On the western side, the outer bank has been spread and flattened into a broad platform, with slight subsidiary banks running from south-south-west to north-north-west and at the north-east. There is a formal entrance through the outer bank on the east side, complete with a causeway crossing the fosse, though how one passed from there into the interior is no longer clear on the ground. The presence of two banks, two fosses, and a causeway entrance marks this out as a more elaborate construction than most ringforts, suggesting it belonged to someone of considerable local standing.