The site at Paddinstown is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the dominant form of rural enclosure from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, typically serving as a farmstead for a single family and its livestock. What sets this one apart is not any great height or drama but the density of what survives within a relatively compact space, roughly 36 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west.

The enclosure is sub-circular and defined by two earthen banks with a fosse between them, a fosse being a ditch, often dug to provide the material for the bank alongside it, and a further external fosse beyond the outer bank. That kind of double-bank arrangement, sometimes called a bivallate ringfort, is generally associated with higher-status occupants in early medieval Ireland, the extra circuit of earthwork indicating additional effort, additional labour, and perhaps additional need for security or display. Much of the inner bank is now fragmentary, though it survives best on the north-north-east to north-east arc and toward the south. The outer bank is similarly incomplete, visible from the east around to the west but replaced in other stretches by a modern field fence, one of the more common fates for earthworks that have been quietly absorbed into working farmland over the centuries. Where both banks remain, there is a notably wide, flat space between them.

Inside the enclosure, the ground holds further traces of occupation. An L-shaped depression near the interior may be the collapsed remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage and occasional refuge. Two grass-covered lengths of bank toward the west-centre of the interior are thought to represent a rectangular house site, and a second possible house site has been identified in the north-east quadrant. Rock outcrops are also visible at the surface. Taken together, these features suggest a settlement that was, at some point, genuinely busy, a place where people built, stored, and lived within these concentric earthen walls.