Grass and rushes have claimed the interior, and the earthen bank that rings it is deeply overgrown, but the geometry of the place is still legible if you know what you are looking at. This is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosed settlement in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but each one carries its own particular character, shaped by the land it occupies and the centuries that have worked on it since.

The enclosure at Rackwallace measures approximately 39 metres on its longest axis and is defined by an earthen bank that, on its outer face, still rises to around four metres in height, giving a sense of how imposing the original structure would have been. Outside the bank runs a fosse, a ditch cut to deepen the effective height of the rampart above it, and beyond that a field bank curves around the western and northern arc. The entrance, now somewhat widened from its original form, lies on the east-south-east side, where a low causeway crosses the fosse. By 1995, the interior had become considerably more overgrown than it appeared in Ordnance Survey aerial photography taken in 1968, a change that speaks to decades of gradual encroachment rather than any single moment of neglect.