This particular example has been largely levelled by centuries of agricultural use, yet its circular outline persists in the ground, a low internal rise of around twenty centimetres and an external bank reaching half a metre still tracing the perimeter of an enclosure roughly twenty-eight metres across. A shallow fosse, the defensive ditch that typically ran outside such earthworks, survives along the south-west to north-east arc, and a gap of around six metres to the south-east suggests where an original entrance once stood.

The site was already legible enough in 1842 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, rendered in the conventional hachured style used to indicate earthen enclosures. Ringforts, or raths, were the dominant settlement type in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, typically housing a single farming family along with their livestock and outbuildings within a circular bank and ditch. That this one survives at all as a surface feature, however faint, is partly a matter of luck and partly of gradient; south-facing slopes in pasture tend to erode more slowly than cultivated ground. What makes the Powerstown site particularly interesting in landscape terms is its immediate neighbourhood. A moated site lies roughly forty metres to the west, and a second ringfort sits about seventy metres to the south-south-west. Moated sites, rectangular enclosures surrounded by water-filled ditches, are generally associated with Anglo-Norman settlement from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward. Finding one so close to two earlier native Irish enclosures suggests a layering of occupation across several centuries within a very small area of ground.