That alone is unremarkable enough for Ireland, where ringforts, or raths, field enclosures built predominantly during the early medieval period, number in the tens of thousands. What makes this one at Kilgawny quietly curious is that it appears to have changed shape between two surveys taken less than eighty years apart.

When the Ordnance Survey recorded the site on its six-inch map in 1837, the enclosure appeared oval, clipped at the north by a trackway and at the east by a field boundary. By the time the revised twenty-five-inch edition was drawn up in 1913, the same enclosure looked rectangular. Whether this reflects actual physical modification of the bank, the clearing or collapse of earlier sections, or simply differing surveying conventions is not recorded. A more detailed description from 1980 gives the enclosure as roughly 34.5 metres east to west and 32.5 metres north to south, enclosed by a bank of earth and stone with no visible entrance feature and no external fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such monuments. The bank survives best along the north-east to south arc, where it retains a curvilinear form and even some internal stone facing at the south and south-south-west. The western and northern sections are noticeably more degraded. Inside, the ground slopes toward the east-north-east and carries old cultivation ridges, suggesting the interior was farmed at some point after the enclosure lost whatever function it originally served. Similar ridge-and-furrow marks survive in the ground just north of the monument, and an old roadway still traces a line outside the bank to the north-east. A preservation order was placed on the site in April 1987.