Ringforts, the circular or oval earthwork enclosures that once served as defended farmsteads during Ireland's early medieval period, are common across the Irish countryside, but it is less common to find one so literally divided by modern infrastructure, leaving each portion to survive in a different state and at a different scale.

The original enclosure was oval, measuring roughly 56 metres on its long axis and 46 metres across, set in undulating pasture in an area whose very placename, Boytonrath, carries the Irish word for a fort. The road running through its centre, about five metres wide, has left the north-east portion visible mainly as a natural rise with only faint traces of the outer fosse, the drainage and defensive ditch that once ran around the perimeter. The south-west side preserves considerably more: a legible sequence of earthen bank, intervening fosse nearly ten metres wide, and an outer bank, their measurements still surveyable. A gap of about two metres through the banks on the western side may be the original entrance to the enclosure, though no causeway across the fosse has been identified. A later field boundary has been built into the outer bank, following the line of the fosse on the south-west but cutting across it to the north-north-west, the kind of incremental agricultural reshaping that happened quietly over centuries. Much of the interior on the western side is now covered in thorn trees. An annexe adjoins the monument to the west, and two further related sites, another ringfort and a separate enclosure, lie within 350 metres in different directions, suggesting this was once a moderately populated farming landscape rather than an isolated homestead.