Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are circular or near-circular enclosures defined by earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as farmsteads for a single family or small community. What makes this one in Kilgawny quietly interesting is how clearly the historical record captures its gradual transformation, from a reasonably well-defined enclosure to something the surrounding land has been slowly reclaiming.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 recorded it as a roughly circular area, approximately 57.5 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank, with the word "fort" annotated on the accompanying Fair Plan map. By the revised 1913 edition of the twenty-five-inch map, the shape had shifted to a modified oval, and the defining feature had softened from a bank to a scarp, suggesting decades of agricultural pressure. A field survey carried out in 1986 recorded the site in more detail: a subcircular enclosure with an earth and stone bank, an outer fosse (a ditch running around the outside of the bank), and what appeared to be a causewayed entrance gap roughly two metres wide on the western side. The bank survived best along the northern arc, while the southern and western sections had been reduced to little more than a slope in the ground. The interior still carried visible cultivation ridges, and the north-east quadrant had been subdivided at some point by a low stone-faced bank, with a further external bank extending outward from the north-east. A preservation order was placed on the monument on 24 April 1987, recognising that what remained was worth protecting even in its diminished state. Aerial photography has since confirmed it as a visible oval enclosure, its outline legible from above in a way it can no longer quite be from the ground.