The bank that traces its perimeter rises barely half a metre above the surrounding ground on its outer face, and only about thirty centimetres on the inside, making it a feature you might dismiss as a natural undulation if you did not know to look. That faint ridge, however, traces a near-perfect circle some thirty-six metres across, and just outside it runs the ghost of a fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, with traces of what may have been a further outer bank beyond that, now almost entirely lost to erosion.

Enclosures of this general type are scattered across the Irish countryside and represent one of the most enduring but least understood forms of early settlement or land management in the archaeological record. Roughly circular earthwork enclosures, often called raths or ring-forts depending on their construction and context, were built and used across a long span of Irish prehistory and the early medieval period, typically as farmsteads surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch that defined a household's space and offered a degree of protection for people and livestock. The example at Irishtown fits the basic form, though its poor state of preservation makes it difficult to say much more with confidence. No entrance causeway or gap in the bank has survived, which is not unusual given how badly the whole structure has weathered. What remains is essentially a trace, the minimum outline of something that was once a defined and deliberate place.