The site at Inchinapallas is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard enclosed homestead of the farming classes in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. What distinguishes this one from the more modest single-banked examples scattered across the country is its double enclosure: two earthen banks separated by a fosse, the term for a ditch dug to reinforce the defensive or boundary function of the earthwork. A second, shallower fosse runs along the southern side of the outer bank. The whole circular enclosure measures roughly 35 metres across, not enormous by ringfort standards, but the doubling of banks and ditches suggests it belonged to someone of at least middling status.

The inner bank is relatively modest, rising only about 0.6 metres internally, and has been partially planted with deciduous trees at some point, which has helped preserve the earthwork but also made the interior inaccessible through overgrowth. The outer bank is more substantial at 1.6 metres high, and the intervening fosse between the two banks is U-shaped in profile, a detail that speaks to how it was dug and how well it has held its shape over more than a thousand years of weathering. About 90 metres to the south-south-west lies the levelled trace of a second circular enclosure, now largely destroyed, which hints that this part of the landscape once carried more organised early medieval settlement than the present-day fields suggest.