What makes it worth pausing over is how complete it remains: the circular earthen bank and its external fosse, the ditch that rings the outside of the enclosure, are both largely intact, and someone at some point appears to have gone to the trouble of deepening the fosse beyond its original cut. That detail alone suggests the site was occupied long enough, and seriously enough, for its inhabitants to invest in improving their own defences.

Ringforts, also known as raths, are the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, built mainly during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads for single family groups. Most are roughly circular, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The Parsonstown example measures approximately 42 metres across east to west, with its bank best preserved in the south-east quadrant. The entrance, a gap of about 2.6 metres, sits at the south-south-east, reached by a causeway across the fosse that is 5.4 metres wide and around a metre high. Inside, faint traces of cultivation ridges still run across the interior from roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, suggesting the enclosed ground was worked at some point, possibly long after the ringfort itself fell out of use as a defended enclosure. A second ringfort lies about 260 metres to the north-west, and a stream marking the townland boundary with Knockatee runs just 60 metres to the east, both details that suggest this was once a settled, active corner of the midlands rather than an isolated spot. The monument was placed on the Register of Historic Monuments in 1989.

The forestry plantation that now surrounds the site, visible in aerial photography from 2011, means the ringfort sits in a different kind of enclosure than its builders ever intended. Modern field fences cut across the monument at the north-east and south-west, a reminder that centuries of agricultural reorganisation have passed over and through it even as the core earthworks endured.