The shape is there if you look for it, roughly thirty-two metres north to south and thirty metres east to west, but time and agriculture have done their work. The enclosing earthen bank is poorly preserved, the external fosse, a defensive ditch that would once have run around the outside of the bank, survives only as a shallow trace visible to the south and west. A gap roughly 1.9 metres wide on the southern side may represent the original entrance through which cattle were driven and people passed.

Ringforts of this type, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a family farmstead and its livestock within a raised bank and ditch. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, and this example at Kilpatrick sits on a natural terrace on a south-west facing slope, positioned to take advantage of views to the north-west and south-east, a placement that was practical as much as it was comfortable. A second earthwork lies about 130 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting this was not an isolated site but part of a wider pattern of settlement across this patch of Westmeath. What complicates the picture today is that a field fence, constructed after 1700, cuts across the site from north-east to south-west, and a roadway intersects the perimeter on the northern side, meaning the modern landscape has quietly carved its way through the ancient one without much ceremony.