A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. This one at Emper is large, measuring roughly 67 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, and what makes it particularly interesting is what is missing. The interior bank that once divided the site into two concentric enclosures, making it a bivallate ringfort, has been levelled entirely, leaving only the substantial outer bank to suggest how elaborate the original structure must have been.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest and most detailed cartographic records of the Irish landscape, preserves what the ground no longer does: a depiction of both enclosing features, with the inner oval measuring approximately 30 metres east to west. By the time surveyors recorded the site in the modern period, that internal feature had vanished. The outer bank itself has had a complicated afterlife. Sections from the south-southwest around to the north-north-east have been steepened and faced with dry-stone walling, suggesting that at some point the bank was pressed into service as a field boundary. A roadway that cuts through the south-west quadrant of the monument was already present when the 1837 map was drawn. Field fences cross the site at the north and north-north-east. Despite all of this disturbance, the bank survives best along its south-east to south-south-west arc, where the original profile is most legible. Faint cultivation ridges running north-east to south-west across the interior hint at agricultural use long after the enclosure ceased to function as a settlement, a common fate for these sites across the Irish midlands.