The original earthwork was pear-shaped rather than the more typical circular form, measuring roughly 43 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south, with its narrower end pointing eastward. That distinctive outline was still legible on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, but by the time a later survey was carried out between 1910 and 1913, the western portion had already been obscured by a field boundary, and only the larger southeastern section remained visible, recorded through hachures indicating a raised area of ground.

When the site was physically inspected in 1990, the picture was one of gradual attrition. A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, is typically a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch or fosse, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. At Davidstown, the surviving southeastern arc still showed a low earthen bank set on a low scarp, but there was no evidence of a fosse, and the northwestern section, lying beyond the field boundary, had been entirely removed. The interior was uneven, and the southwestern and western areas bore signs of past quarrying, suggesting the earthwork had been mined for material at some point. That same inspection turned up something more unexpected: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage or as a place of refuge, was discovered in the northwestern portion of the monument, precisely the section that had otherwise been lost.