The fort sits in ordinary pasture on a gentle south-facing slope, its oval interior still level and grassed over, giving little away at first glance. But the earthworks themselves, two roughly concentric banks with ditches between and beyond them, tell a more layered story once you begin to read the ground.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. They served as farmsteads for a single family or extended household, the banks and ditches providing a degree of security for people and livestock alike. The Duckstown example is oval in plan, measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west. It has an inner bank, still standing to an external height of 1.5 metres and best preserved along its south-eastern to south-western arc, and a wider, flat-topped outer bank about 3 metres across, though the public road has clipped away its north-north-western to north-north-eastern section. Between the two banks lies a waterlogged fosse, a defensive ditch, around 2.2 metres wide and half a metre deep, which widens to 4 metres on the western side and has been partially infilled with earth and stones at the south-east. A gap of about 4 metres in the outer bank at the west likely marks the original entrance. The survey was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011.

The fort is accessible from the public road that runs along its northern edge, though the road has clearly encroached on the outer bank over time. Visitors approaching from that side will notice how the outer fosse becomes indistinct toward the north, eroded or buried by road works across the years. The interior is under pasture and privately owned, so access beyond the roadside view would require landowner permission. The oak sitting on the inner bank at the south is the most visually distinctive feature and a useful orienting point; old trees rooted in ringfort banks are not uncommon in Ireland, and their presence sometimes reflects a long-standing local reluctance to disturb ground that carried folklore associations well into the modern era.