Look more carefully, though, and the geometry becomes harder to dismiss. The monument is built in two distinct steps, a lower circular platform roughly 38 metres across giving way to a raised inner platform of about 22 metres, the whole thing engineered with enough precision that the upper surface appears level when seen from a distance, even though the surrounding ground falls away sharply to the east. Walk up onto it, and the illusion partly dissolves: the centre is in fact gently domed, with what reads as a shallow internal ditch most visible to the north and south-west. Boulder revetments, stone facings used to hold an earthwork's edge in place, survive along parts of the upper and lower steps. There is no visible entrance.

Surveyed in 2015 by David McGuinness, the site sits at the edge of a low rise where the ground drops quickly toward poorly drained land less than 100 metres to the south-east. Its classification has not been straightforward. A ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, is typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. This monument has the right general shape but lacks some of the expected features clearly enough to complicate the identification. What makes the surrounding landscape particularly striking is that Edmonstown does not offer one such monument but several. About 300 metres to the south-east sits a second, closely comparable structure, this one with a stone-revetted bank that makes its ringfort character somewhat plainer. Around 400 metres further in the same direction is a third and larger monument, known as Rathmore on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, with foundations of a structure visible inside and a bank enclosing the outer step in a way that clarifies its ditch. An unclassified barrow lies about 800 metres to the north in Edmondstown townland, and a ring-barrow, a burial monument typically defined by a low bank surrounding a central area, sits roughly 1.2 kilometres to the north-north-west in Jeffrystown. The clustering suggests this corner of Westmeath was a place of some significance across a long stretch of prehistory and early history, though the precise relationships between these monuments remain unresolved.