The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. These were typically circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and a surrounding ditch, built to house a farming family and their livestock. At Kilpatrick, the circular area measures approximately twenty metres east to west, and what remains is a raised interior that climbs gently towards its centre, the ghost of a bank still legible along the north-west to west arc and again from the east to south-east, and a fosse, the external ditch that once reinforced the bank, just barely traceable at the north-west.

What makes the site quietly melancholy is the manner of its partial survival. When the ridge was planted with commercial forestry, much of the monument was levelled in the process, and the trees that now cover it make both access and observation difficult. This is not an uncommon fate for ringforts across Ireland, where agricultural improvement, forestry planting, and simple neglect have reduced thousands of once-visible enclosures to crop marks or near-invisibility. What survives here does so in spite of those pressures rather than because of any particular protection. Notably, two further ringforts lie within roughly two hundred metres of this one, suggesting that the ridge at Kilpatrick once supported a cluster of adjacent early medieval settlements, a pattern found elsewhere in the Irish midlands where good elevated ground was at a premium.