The example at Sheepstown occupies a natural rise with open views in every direction, the kind of position that would have suited a farming family of middling rank during the first millennium, when ringforts, known in Irish as raths, served as enclosed homesteads rather than military fortifications. A rath typically consists of a circular earthen bank, or sometimes several concentric banks, enclosing a domestic interior where people lived, stored food, and kept livestock safe at night.

This particular rath is roughly sub-circular in plan, measuring approximately 34.5 metres north to south and 31.5 metres east to west. It is enclosed by two earthen banks with a wide, shallow fosse between them; a fosse is simply a ditch, dug to provide material for the banks and to add a further obstacle to anyone approaching uninvited. Neither bank has survived in great shape. The inner bank, about three metres wide and only 0.35 metres high, is best preserved along its northern arc from northwest to northeast, while the outer bank has all but vanished except at the south. The fosse itself reads most clearly at the north and south. Entry was from the southwest, where a gap 1.8 metres wide and a causeway five metres across allowed passage over the ditch. Inside, the ground rises slightly towards the centre, and two low, broad, parallel banks run roughly west-northwest to east-southeast in the southern quadrant; these may be the faint remains of a hut site, the kind of low earthwork left behind when a timber or wattle structure finally rots away entirely. A stream marking the townland boundary with Archerstown runs about 240 metres to the north, and two further ringforts sit within 330 metres to the east-northeast and 70 metres to the southeast respectively, suggesting a landscape that was once far more densely occupied than it appears today.