What makes it worth a second look is its double-bank construction, a feature that sets it apart from the majority of Irish ringforts, which typically make do with a single enclosing bank. Here, two concentric earthen banks, each close to two metres high, survive around a roughly circular interior measuring 32 metres across, with a fosse, or ditch, running between them and a further external fosse cut to the south and east.

Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when they are earthen in form, were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the banks and ditches providing a degree of security for a farming family and their livestock rather than any serious military defence. The double-bank arrangement at Monaparson, with its intervening fosse and an outer ditch still traceable around much of the circuit, suggests a site of some local status; the more elaborate the earthworks, the more resources were available to build them. The inner bank reaches an internal height of around 1.9 metres, while the outer bank, at approximately 1.8 metres, survives continuously around the full circuit. Not everything has remained intact: the outer bank has gaps to the north-west and south-south-west, the latter now plugged by a later stone wall, and earth and stone have been dumped along the outer edge of the fosse on the southern and north-western arc.

The banks are heavily overgrown, which is common for earthworks that have spent centuries being absorbed quietly into agricultural land. That overgrowth is also, in a practical sense, what protects them, the vegetation binding the soil and slowing erosion. A visitor looking carefully at the ground level would still be able to trace the fosse between the two banks and get a clear sense of the concentric geometry that made this, in its day, a well-defended and deliberately imposing enclosure.