Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed primarily from earthworks, were the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family's house, outbuildings, and animals within a raised bank and, usually, an outer ditch. What makes this particular example quietly worth noting is the absence of that outer ditch, or fosse, entirely. There is no entrance feature either, both elements that are ordinarily expected in a monument of this type.

When the site was described in 1971 and again in 1977, surveyors recorded a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 30.3 metres east to west and 29.5 metres north to south, enclosed by a narrow bank of earth and stone covered in grass. The bank survives well along the eastern, southern, and northern arcs, but along the north-eastern stretch it has been reduced to a scarp, a low slope rather than a defined raised edge. Several slight gaps break the bank at various points, suggesting minor disturbances over the centuries. Inside the enclosure, faint cultivation ridges run in a north-east to south-west direction, a detail that hints at later agricultural use of the interior long after the site ceased to function as a settlement. The place-name element "Kilkenny Abbey" in the townland name points to an ecclesiastical presence in the broader area at some period, though the ringfort itself is a secular monument, its origins likely in the first millennium AD.