The earthwork is a rath, the most common type of early medieval enclosed farmstead in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic area. At Davidstown, the enclosure measures roughly 60 metres northeast to southwest and 55 metres northwest to southeast, but its edges have been worn and redirected over centuries until the original form survives only in fragments, some of it now doubled up as ordinary field fencing.

By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded this part of County Westmeath in 1837, the monument had already lost enough of its definition to read on the six-inch map as little more than a U-shaped field boundary. The revised 1913 edition shows it differently again, this time as a semi-circular field boundary, suggesting the enclosure continued to erode or be redrawn between surveys. A description from 1983 gives the clearest picture of what remains: a bank of earth and stone best preserved along the southwest to west-northwest arc, where it has been incorporated into a field fence; a lower, degraded section continuing round to the north-northeast before being cut by another boundary; and the eastern quadrant also truncated by a field boundary running northeast to southwest. Where the bank has gone entirely, a low scarp marks its course. There is no surviving external fosse, the ditch that would typically have reinforced the enclosing bank from the outside. The interior has been cultivated, and a belt of trees planted in the southwest sector now makes the site readable on aerial photography as a broad, semi-circular wooded area within otherwise open farmland. At the centre of the enclosure lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval raths, likely used for storage or as a place of refuge. Survey work has indicated that the enclosing elements of the monument originally extended further than the current field boundaries suggest, reaching beyond the northeast and southeast edges of the modern field system.