When inspectors visited the following June, the outlines of the structure were still legible in the soil, a ghost of earthwork persisting in a field that had been cleared and farmed over.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and ditch, built primarily during the early medieval period as farmsteads or places of habitation. The Rathpatrick example measured approximately 44 metres in diameter, its ploughed-out bank surviving as a stony band of soil about three metres wide. On the eastern side, a gap of around four metres breaks this band, which may mark the position of the original entrance, a common feature in ringforts of this type. More striking still was a circular patch of very dark earth, roughly five metres across, situated about ten metres inward from the southern edge. The discolouration, accompanied by blackened stones and flecks of charcoal, points to burning of some kind, though whether this relates to domestic activity from the ringfort's period of use, or to something else entirely, is not recorded. The field itself sits on well-drained, level, reclaimed land, the kind of ground that made it attractive to farmers both in the early medieval period and in the twentieth century.