The earthwork at Clonickilvant sits on a slight rise, positioned so that it once looked out over open bog to the south-west and west, a commanding prospect in early medieval terms even if the ground is modest by any dramatic measure. A second ringfort lies roughly eighty metres to the west, which suggests this corner of the midlands once held enough social or agricultural significance to support more than one such enclosed settlement in close proximity.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, was typically a circular or oval enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. At Clonickilvant, the monument was recorded on the revised 1913 Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map as a suboval earthwork measuring approximately thirty-three metres north-west to south-east and twenty-four metres north-east to south-west. By the time a more detailed description was made in 1970, the structure had already lost much of its definition. The inner bank, originally some four metres wide at its base, had been worn almost level with the interior on one side and reduced to a low scarp along a wide arc from south-south-west to west. A section of that scarp had been quarried away at the western edge, removing whatever remained there. The original entrance had disappeared entirely, though a gap of nearly seven metres across the inner bank at the south-south-east may mark where it once stood. A shallow fosse, the ditch that would have separated the inner and outer banks, survives only in a short stretch at the south-east. Inside the enclosure, faint cultivation ridges run across a north-west-facing slope, a reminder that the interior continued to be worked as farmland long after the structure had lost any defensive or domestic function. Three stones are still visible within the enclosure, two protruding from the interior surface on the north-west and a third set just inside the bank at the north-east, though their original purpose is not recorded.