Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Most were the homesteads of farming families, their banks serving as much to contain livestock as to offer any serious defence. What makes the Rinville example quietly striking is how thoroughly time and agriculture have worked against it, leaving a structure that once measured roughly 58 metres east to west and 44 metres north to south as something barely legible in the landscape.

The fort was catalogued by McCaffrey in 1952, who classified it as an oval earthen fort defined by a bank. An earlier account, by Athy in 1914, described a levelled ditch and outer bank, suggesting the site was already in a diminished state by the early twentieth century. By the time of a more recent inspection, even that outer element had gone; all that remained visible was a 16.5-metre arc of the inner bank, curving from east-north-east to south-east. The gap between those two records, roughly four decades, captures the quiet, incremental loss that many such sites across Ireland have experienced, caught between the pressures of working farmland and the slow settling of earthen construction into the soil around it.