What looks like a gentle swell in the ground resolves into a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, defined by two concentric earthen banks with a wide, deep fosse, or ditch, cut between them. Ringforts of this kind, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the early centuries AD through to the Norman period, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. What distinguishes this example is the presence of two banks rather than one, a configuration sometimes associated with higher-status occupants, though the outer bank here has been worn down considerably and is only faintly legible from the south, west, and north-west.

The entrance is still readable in the landscape. A gap 2.6 metres wide cuts through the inner bank at the south-south-east, and a causeway, just under six metres wide and still standing about sixty centimetres above the base of the fosse, carries the original approach across the ditch. That the causeway survives at all gives some sense of how the site would have functioned in use, with a single controlled point of access framing movement in and out of the enclosure. The interior tilts very slightly from south to north, following the natural contour of the rise on which the whole structure sits. A second ringfort lies roughly 360 metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of Paddinstown once supported a modest cluster of enclosed settlements, each occupying its own modest prominence in the undulating ground.