The raised area measures roughly fifty metres across and is ringed by a bank some five and a half metres wide, though it rises only about half a metre above the surrounding ground. What makes it easy to overlook is precisely how thoroughly the land has reclaimed it: mature deciduous trees and dense scrub cover the interior, and along a stretch running from the south-east around through south to north-east, both the enclosing bank and the outer fosse have been folded into an ordinary field boundary, becoming agricultural infrastructure rather than ancient monument.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in the country. Ringforts were typically the enclosed farmsteads of farming families, built roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and they survive across Ireland in their thousands, though many have been levelled by ploughing or land improvement. The earthen bank at Ledwithstown would originally have been paired with a fosse, a dry external ditch dug to provide the material for the bank and to add a further barrier. A survey carried out in 1995 recorded that fosse as still measurable in places, roughly four metres wide and forty centimetres deep, though it has since disappeared from view along the north-east to south-east arc of the circuit. The original entrance, which in most ringforts appears as a deliberate gap or causeway across the fosse, is no longer recognisable here.