A large portion of its northeastern perimeter has been quarried out entirely, leaving a monument that reads more as an interrupted arc than the enclosed circuit it once formed. Quarry holes pock the interior, and residual spoil heaps still sit where the material was left behind, giving the site an oddly industrial afterlife for something that began as an early medieval farmstead.

A ringfort, or rath, is essentially a circular or oval enclosure defined by an earthen bank and, typically, an external ditch called a fosse, used in early medieval Ireland as a defended homestead for a farming family. The Higginstown example sits in low-lying pasture, overlooked by higher ground and afforded only restricted views of the surrounding landscape, which is itself slightly unusual since such enclosures often sought commanding positions. The townland boundary with Killucan runs immediately to the south. The 1913 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map records the earthwork as roughly oval in plan, measuring approximately 47 metres west-northwest to east-southeast and 36 metres north-northeast to south-southwest. When the monument was examined between 1970 and 1972, the bank still showed several small gaps alongside the larger quarried breach at the northeast, and only very slight traces of the fosse remained along the northwestern to north-northeastern arc. A possible original entrance was identified at the southeast, where a gap measures roughly 4.7 metres wide at the top and 1.8 metres at the base, though this identification is tentative. A field boundary now runs along the southern edge of the monument from south-southeast round to south-southwest, further constraining what can be read on the ground. The site is still legible on aerial photography as a tree-planted earthwork, the ring of vegetation marking what the earthworks alone no longer fully describe.