What survives is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD to protect a family's dwelling and livestock within a raised bank. This one sits on a gentle south-facing slope, with steep ground both above and below it, giving the enclosure a quietly watchful quality. A disused trackway still skirts its northeastern edge, suggesting it once sat beside a route that people actually used.

The earthwork is oval in plan, measuring approximately 39 metres northeast to southwest and 29.5 metres across the shorter axis. Its defining bank of earth and stone, between 3.4 and 6 metres wide and up to 1.4 metres high, runs from the southeast around the south to the northwest. At the northeast, where a later field boundary cuts across the site, the edge of the enclosure survives instead as an abrupt scarp about 0.8 metres high. A possible entrance, roughly 2.5 metres wide, can be identified at the southeast. Inside the enclosure, close to the western bank, there is a sunken rectangular hut foundation measuring 7 by 4 metres, the kind of slight depression that marks where a timber or post-built structure once stood. A low earthen bank about 12 metres long runs through the northeastern sector. The whole site has since been bisected by a field bank and ditch, a reminder that generations of farmers have quietly reorganised the land around and through it without much concern for what lay underneath.

The association with a church is intriguing and not straightforwardly dismissible. Kilnamanagh, as a place name, derives from the Irish meaning "church of the monks", which at least suggests an early ecclesiastical presence somewhere in the townland, even if the ringfort itself shows no obvious structural signs of religious use. Whether the local memory preserves a genuine tradition or has simply attached itself to the most visible ancient feature in the landscape is a question the earthwork cannot easily answer.