The enclosure at Ballinvally is one of those sites that the landscape has quietly absorbed, leaving almost nothing at ground level to betray its presence, yet from aerial photographs taken as recently as July 2021 it resolves into something quite deliberate: a near-complete subcircular ring, roughly 40 metres across, defined by a ditch that varies between about 1.75 metres wide on its northern arc and 2.57 metres on the southern.

The enclosure sits at around 84 metres above sea level on gently rolling ground that slopes east towards the Red Cross River and rises more sharply to the west. In that wider landscape, it is far from alone. About 780 metres to the north-north-east lies a ruined church set within a moated site at Chapel, and roughly 760 metres to the north-west, the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1838 recorded a feature marked as St. Patrick's Well at Ballinvally Upper. That holy well has since vanished entirely, leaving no surface trace. The clustering of an enclosure, a moated church site, and a now-lost holy well within less than a kilometre of one another suggests this corner of Wicklow carried some significance across several different periods, though what exactly connected these features remains unclear. Adding to the puzzle, a possible ring-ditch, a smaller circular earthwork just over nine metres in diameter, appears to overlap the main enclosure's ditch in its north-western quadrant, and no definitive entrance gap has been identified anywhere along the circuit.