The ringfort at Newtown sits on high ground with good views across undulating terrain, yet its survival owes more to the accident of fallow ground than to any deliberate protection. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, their circular banks and external ditches marking out a family's living space and livestock enclosure. This one measures roughly 30 metres in diameter, which places it at the modest end of the scale.

By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1839 and 1840, only the south-western quadrant of the enclosure was recorded, suggesting the rest had already been lost to agricultural reshaping. Field boundaries cutting through both the eastern and northern sectors had further disrupted what remained. The site suffered more direct damage in 1997 during the construction of a rugby pitch for Kilkenny College, when work on the western side exposed the fosse, the external ditch that would originally have reinforced the enclosure's defences. That ditch proved to be around five metres wide and two metres deep, and its fill told a compressed story of abandonment: a base layer of clay, gravel, and stones, an old humus layer above it indicating a period when vegetation reclaimed the ditch, and a final upper layer of gravel and clay. The southern sector retained the most substantial surviving bank, between four and six metres wide, standing roughly a metre above the interior ground level and two and a half metres above the exterior. The eastern portion, which extends into the golf club land, appears to have been levelled entirely.