The old fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around the outside of the enclosing bank, was at some point pressed into service as a passage, complete with circular stone piers and a gate opening onto the public road. It is a small, unremarkable-looking thing to pass through, but the repurposing of an ancient boundary as a working laneway says something about how these monuments get absorbed into daily life rather than simply abandoned.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are roughly circular enclosures typically dating from the early medieval period, built as defended farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This one sits in level pastureland in the townland of Temple-Etney, measuring around 43.5 metres north to south and approximately 33.7 metres east to west. It is enclosed by an earthen bank and a flat-bottomed fosse, both best preserved on the western side, where the bank still rises to a height of nearly 1.6 metres on its exterior face. What makes this particular site topographically interesting is the townland boundary, which follows the line of the south-eastern quadrant in a way that is essentially concentric with the monument itself. As it runs alongside the ringfort, that boundary forms a substantial earthen bank nearly 1.8 metres high before tapering away. The two features, one ancient enclosure and one administrative line, have ended up shadowing each other so closely that the space between them was eventually absorbed into that laneway. A limited excavation carried out by Moran in 1996, extending up to ten metres beyond the fosse, found nothing of archaeological significance outside the monument's edge.

The bank is clearest on the western side, while brambles and scrub have colonised much of the south-western quadrant and the perimeter generally. There is some evidence of dumping and burning in the fosse to the north-west, the kind of low-level disturbance that affects many accessible monuments in agricultural landscapes. The slight causeway at the south-western end of the fosse, probably the original entrance point, is most likely what prompted the later lane to settle where it did.