The ground inside appears to dip towards the centre, a detail that hints at the long process of settlement, use, and slow subsidence that followed the site's abandonment, but the vegetation makes any closer reading impossible without clearance work.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. They were built by farming families as much as by chieftains, and several thousand survive across the island in varying states of preservation. The Kilfinny example is modest but coherent: a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, defined by an earthen bank that rises about 0.9 metres on the interior and nearly 1.9 metres on the exterior face, with an external fosse, or ditch, approximately 1.7 metres wide running around the outside. A causeway entrance, 2 metres wide, breaks the circuit at the east. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with the record uploaded in August 2011, and aerial photographs taken in March 2006 document its condition from above, where the circular form reads far more clearly than it does at ground level.

The rath sits within a landscape that has continued to use it, after a fashion. Field boundaries follow the outer edge of the fosse to the north-east and east, and another boundary that once abutted the enclosure to the south-south-west has since been removed, suggesting gradual agricultural reorganisation around the monument rather than through it. Visitors approaching on foot across the pasture will find the earthen bank most legible from the exterior, where the full height difference between ditch bottom and bank top is most apparent. The causeway entrance at the east is the clearest structural feature visible from ground level. The overgrowth that fills the interior makes walking inside impractical, but it also means the internal earthworks have been left largely undisturbed.