The site at Drumrackan is a ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, typically associated with early medieval farming communities between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes any individual example worth pausing over is the precision with which the landscape shaped it, and the degree to which so much of the original form still survives in the ground.

The enclosure measures approximately 34 metres across at its widest and is defined by an earthen bank, between five and six metres wide, that stands noticeably higher on its outer face than its inner. Around much of the circuit, an external fosse, essentially a ditch dug to throw up the bank material and to add a further obstacle to any approach, remains visible. At its most intact stretch, running roughly west-southwest to east-northeast, the ditch top measures over eight metres wide, narrowing to around three and a half to five metres at the base, and dropping perhaps thirty to forty centimetres in depth. Elsewhere the bank has been worn to a simple scarp and the fosse reduced to little more than a flat berm. The entrance, four and a half metres wide, faces east, an orientation common in ringforts and one sometimes associated with practical reasons of light and prevailing wind. The Yellow River bends past the site some forty metres to the southeast, close enough to have supplied water and perhaps influenced the choice of this particular knoll for settlement.