At roughly 35 metres across, it presents as a raised circular area enclosed by a well-preserved earthen bank, with a narrow entrance gap of about 2.1 metres opening to the northeast. The interior rises gradually toward a level platform at the centre, and the outer ditch, while slight, remains visible from the northern and north-north-south-east arc. On the surface it reads as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, those circular enclosures of raised earth that served as farmsteads and defended homesteads throughout early medieval Ireland. But something here complicates that reading.

The suspicion is that this may not be an early medieval rath at all, but rather an Anglo-Norman ringwork, a type of fortification the Normans introduced to Ireland from the late twelfth century onward. Where a motte and bailey used a raised conical mound topped by a timber tower, a ringwork relied instead on a circular embanked enclosure at ground level, broadly similar in appearance to a rath but typically associated with a different period and a different set of occupants. What lends weight to this interpretation at Hiskinstown is the wider landscape context. Aerial photographs reveal a series of linear earthworks to the east and south-east that may represent a planned field system associated with the enclosure, and just 50 metres to the east lies a site tentatively identified as a possible castle. That cluster of features, an embanked enclosure, an adjacent probable castle, and the ghost of an organised agricultural landscape, fits a pattern of Anglo-Norman rural settlement more neatly than it fits a lone early Irish farmstead.