This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Thousands were built, mostly during the early medieval period, as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of varying status. The enclosing bank and its accompanying fosse, an external ditch dug to reinforce the barrier, were less about military defence and more about defining a household boundary, keeping livestock in and wolves out.

The earthwork at Higginstown sits on a slight rise with open views in every direction, a siting typical of ringforts whose occupants valued visibility across the surrounding land. When surveyors measured it in the early 1970s, the roughly circular interior came to approximately 32 metres across its longest axis. A bank and external fosse enclosed the space, with what appears to be an entrance gap on the south-south-east side. The bank survives best along the western and northern arc; elsewhere it has been reduced to little more than a scarp, a low eroded slope, by centuries of agricultural activity. Quarrying has further disturbed the ground on the southern and western sides. A shallow fosse remains visible to the north. The monument had already been recorded as a circular earthwork on the revised Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1913, suggesting it was recognisable in the landscape even then. More intriguing is the possible souterrain in the north-east of the interior. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically stone-lined, associated with early medieval settlement sites and thought to have served for storage or refuge.

From the air, the roughly circular outline of the earthwork is still legible in aerial photography, which says something about how much of the original form has survived despite the evident damage at ground level.