What may have begun as a ringfort, one of the circular earthen enclosures built throughout early medieval Ireland as farmsteads or places of status, was later planted with trees and pressed into service as a tree-ring, a practice common among landowners after 1700 who used such plantings as windbreaks, ornamental features, or timber reserves. The result is a site that sits ambiguously between two purposes, neither fully one thing nor the other.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 records the enclosure as a roughly oval tree-planted feature. By the time of the revised twenty-five-inch map in 1913, it had shifted to a more D-shaped outline, approximately 26 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 25 metres north-northwest to south-southeast, with a notably straight edge along the northern side. When the monument was described on the ground in 1971, surveyors found a roughly circular area of about 22 metres by 19 metres, defined by a bank that had by then been reduced to a scarp, a low slope where an earthen bank has worn or been cut back. The bank and scarp show signs of later modification across much of their circuit, from the southeast around through south, west, and north. The original entrance has left no visible trace, and there is no surviving fosse, the ditch that would typically accompany a ringfort's enclosing bank. Inside, the ground carries a gentle slope facing south-southeast, along with faint cultivation ridges running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, suggesting the interior was farmed at some point.

What survives at Kilgawny is a palimpsest of interventions, each generation leaving its mark on a feature whose original form is now largely obscured. The tree cover that once defined it so clearly on nineteenth-century maps has itself changed shape, the D-form of 1913 giving way to the oval visible in more recent aerial photography. The earthwork beneath, whatever its origins, continues to erode quietly beneath the pasture.