The earthwork at Davidstown is a bivallate ringfort, meaning it was enclosed not by one bank and ditch but by two concentric rings of defence, a construction choice that set it apart from the more common single-ringed raths that dot the Irish countryside. Ringforts in general were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, and their earthen banks served as much to define status and demarcate livestock enclosures as to provide serious military protection. A double-banked example like this one would have signalled something about the standing of whoever lived inside it.

When surveyors examined the monument in 1983, they recorded a circular enclosure roughly 33 metres in diameter, defined by an inner bank rising approximately one metre in height, a broad shallow fosse, or ditch, of about four metres in width, and a lower outer bank beyond that. The inner bank climbs around 1.5 metres above the fosse on its inner face, and at the eastern side large boulders are set against it facing into the interior, a detail that gives a sense of deliberate construction rather than simple piled earth. The whole structure is best preserved along its northern, eastern, and southern arcs; the western side has been worn down considerably over the centuries. A causewayed entrance survives at the south-east, flanked by large stone slabs set into the inner bank on either side. Beneath the enclosed interior lies a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly built into ringforts, probably used for storage or as a place of refuge. The ringfort had already been mapped as a circular earthwork on the Ordnance Survey six-inch edition of 1837 and was still recorded on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, suggesting it remained a visible and recognised feature of the landscape across that period. A second ringfort sits roughly 170 metres to the south-east, hinting that this was once a more densely settled corner of the midlands than the quiet pasture there today would suggest.