What makes it worth pausing over is the detail of its survival: the inner earthen bank still stands about a metre high on the interior, while the outer bank, at roughly 0.6 metres, retains enough height to read clearly in the landscape. Between the two banks runs a fosse, the shallow ditch that in such enclosures served both as a drainage feature and as an additional barrier. The southern section of the outer bank has been levelled, most likely through centuries of agricultural use, and the ground just outside the enclosure to the north-east remains waterlogged.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. They functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, the banks and fosse marking out a protected space for a family and their livestock. The double-bank arrangement at Bunkilla suggests a household of some local standing; single banks were more common, and the added labour of constructing a second circuit usually reflected either greater resources or a specific need to manage the wet, sloping ground nearby. The waterlogging to the north-east may have influenced how the site was laid out from the beginning, with the enclosure positioned to keep the living area above the worst of the seasonal damp.