What remains is a cropmark, a ghostly circular outline roughly 40 metres in diameter that becomes visible only from the air, when differences in soil moisture and crop growth betray the buried remains of an enclosure that was once a going concern of early medieval life.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they were defined by earthen banks and ditches, were the dominant form of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They typically enclosed a family's dwelling and associated outbuildings within a circular boundary, as much a statement of status as a defensive structure. The Ralphtown example sits on fairly level ground, and its defining feature, the single enclosing element visible on aerial photographs, suggests a relatively modest construction. That a ringfort of any scale once occupied this particular patch of Wexford farmland is itself a small corrective to the assumption that the early medieval landscape was a scattered thing; in fact, it was densely settled, and sites like this one are distributed across the country in their tens of thousands, the majority now flattened by centuries of tillage and drainage.