Most ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads built across Ireland during the early medieval period, consist of a single bank and ditch. Kilpatrick Fort is trivallate, meaning it has three concentric lines of defence: an inner bank, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and a further intervening bank, with traces of what may be a third outer bank visible at the west-northwest. That degree of elaboration, relatively rare, points to a site of some significance in its time.

The fort sits on rough, level pasture at around 112 metres above sea level. When it was formally described in 1983, the inner bank measured 31 metres in diameter and retained internal stone facing, suggesting careful construction rather than simply piled earth. The fall from the inner bank down to the fosse is roughly two to three metres, a meaningful drop even now, though livestock have poached and eroded the ditch in places over the years. The intervening bank beyond has suffered similarly. Within the interior, there are traces of a house site, the kind of domestic structure one might expect at the core of an early medieval farmstead. The fort appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 and again on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, annotated by name on both, and it was also recorded on an estate map of the nearby Sonna Demesne, suggesting it remained a recognised landmark well into the period of organised land management in the area. Aerial photography from around 1973 captured it as a well-preserved earthwork, and more recent satellite imagery shows it partially ringed by trees.