What remains is still legible enough to reward attention. The enclosure is subcircular in plan, a shape that has shifted slightly in interpretation between the 1837 and 1913 Ordnance Survey maps, the earlier recording it as subcircular and the later as suboval, a small discrepancy that hints at how much the monument had already changed in the intervening decades.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed settlement that was built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, typically as the homestead of a single farming family. The Hopestown example has two concentric banks separated by a fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug to provide material for the banks and to add a degree of defensive depth. When the site was described in detail in 1981, the inner bank of earth and stone was found to be best preserved along its southern and western arcs, where large stones are still visible within the bank, though without any trace of formal stone facing. The most structurally complete feature is the entrance on the south-south-east side, where a causewayed gap crosses the fosse at a width of over eight metres at its base, with the causeway itself rising to about a metre. This kind of causewayed entrance, where the ditch was left uncut to allow passage across, is a common feature of ringforts. The outer bank survives reasonably well to the west and north-west but has been straightened and reduced in the north and north-east, where a quarry depression has eaten into it. Inside, the ground slopes gently to the south-east, and traces of cultivation ridges crossing the interior suggest the enclosure was pressed into agricultural use long after its original purpose had been forgotten. A house site sits on a raised platform in the north-west quadrant, pointing to yet another phase of later occupation layered over the early medieval remains.