The remains at Whinning form a sub-circular enclosure roughly 47 metres across, its boundary now little more than a low earthen bank that has weathered down to a scarp. A fosse, the defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the outer edge, survives in its shallowest form, most visible on the south-eastern side. A rath of this kind, an earthen ringfort typically enclosing a family farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, would once have been a purposeful, inhabited place. Here, the grass has long since smoothed it almost flat.

The site sits on a gentle south-east facing slope, and the positioning feels deliberate. Portlick Bay lies roughly 260 metres to the north, Rinardoo Bay about 270 metres to the south, so the enclosure occupies a spur of land with water visible on two sides and clear sightlines in most directions. That sense of landscape awareness is reinforced by the cluster of monuments nearby. Approximately 310 metres to the north-north-east stands Portlick Castle, and around 400 metres to the south-east is an early Christian monastery site, onto which a church, graveyard, and a motte and bailey castle were later built. A motte and bailey is a Norman fortification consisting of a raised earthen mound, the motte, adjoined by an enclosed courtyard, the bailey, and the fact that one was placed directly on top of a monastic site speaks to the layered, sometimes disruptive way in which successive periods of settlement overlapped in this part of the midlands. The rath at Whinning predates all of this, and its relationship to the monastery site is an open question.

The interior of the enclosure slopes gently from west-north-west to east-south-east, and it is this slight gradient, combined with the curving scarp of the bank, that makes the shape readable from within the site itself. The fosse is easier to pick out on the south-eastern arc, where erosion has been kinder to the original form.