The earthen bank, still standing to about 0.8 metres in height, traces a near-complete ring roughly 44 metres across from north to south, interrupted only where it has been levelled to the east. It is the kind of place that reads as a slightly anomalous thickening of the landscape until you understand what you are looking at.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead that was the most common unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation, defined typically by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches enclosing a domestic interior. The Bellanaloob example sits 350 metres east of a second ringfort in the same area, a proximity that suggests this part of County Mayo once supported a reasonably dense pattern of early agricultural settlement around the margins of Lough Mask and Lough Carra. The interior here has been quarried in parts, a common fate for ringforts whose banks and enclosed ground were found useful as a source of stone or fill, and the bank itself is now heavily overgrown and tree-lined, which gives it a certain visual presence while also obscuring its original profile.