What makes it quietly unusual, though, is not the view but the outer bank on its south-western arc, a feature so exceptionally wide that surveyors have suggested it may once have functioned as a small bailey, the kind of enclosed yard more commonly associated with Norman fortifications than with early medieval Irish ringforts. The combination of the two traditions in a single earthwork gives the site an ambiguity that a casual glance across the pasture would never reveal.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of defended settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family and their livestock would have lived. The Rathordan example is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric enclosures separated by a fosse, a ditch. The inner bank, built of earth and stone with stone-facing still visible along the south-western arc, measures roughly 33 metres west-north-west to east-south-east and 31 metres north-north-east to south-south-west. A wide, flat-bottomed fosse separates it from the outer bank, which reaches nearly three metres in external height where it is best preserved to the east and north-north-east. Both enclosures share a corresponding entrance gap on the east-south-east side, with a causeway running between them. At some later point in the site's life, that causeway was pressed into new service as a loading ramp for a lime kiln, the remnants of which still abut the outer bank at the east-south-east. A lime kiln was a stone-built structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for agricultural use, and its presence here, alongside a large quarried depression mapped to the east-south-east, suggests a fairly intensive phase of post-medieval activity that made practical use of whatever ancient stonework was close to hand.

The interior slopes steadily downward toward the east and is now heavily obscured by whitethorn scrub around the perimeter and in the north-western and east-south-eastern sectors. The banks themselves have been breached in multiple places by cattle, which is a common fate for earthworks in working farmland, though enough survives to read the overall plan clearly. The stone-facing on the inner bank's south-western arc is particularly worth seeking out, as it is the most structurally legible section of the whole monument.