What is quietly striking about this particular example is how much of it has been absorbed into the working landscape around it, its ancient boundaries quietly repurposed by whoever last divided these fields.

The site takes a sub-circular form, approximately 25 metres across from east to west, and would originally have been defined by an earthen bank and a shallow external fosse, the fosse being the ditch dug to provide material for the bank itself. Ringforts, also known as raths, were typically farmstead enclosures of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, built to protect a household and its livestock rather than to serve any military purpose. Here, the southern to north-north-western arc of that bank and fosse has been incorporated into a field fence, which has had the effect of steepening and preserving that stretch of the perimeter. The opposite side tells a different story: from the east-north-east around to the south-east, the bank has been levelled almost entirely. A field fence cuts across the monument at its northern end, running east-north-east to west-south-west, bisecting what remains. Two further ringforts sit close by, one 120 metres to the north-north-west and another 155 metres to the south, suggesting this part of Kilpatrick was once a settled and divided landscape in a way that the present grassland gives little indication of.