The altar is not a ruin in the usual sense; it is largely intact, carefully constructed, and oddly purposeful in a setting that no longer has a church around it.

The structure is late medieval in date, built from punch-dressed limestone blocks, a technique in which the stone surface is worked with a pointed tool to produce a regular, textured finish. The base measures 2.8 metres long and just under a metre high, and supports a top of well-fitted limestone slabs nearly three metres in length, with a rolled, overhanging edge that suggests some attention to finish as well as function. Against the eastern face of the altar stand the remnants of a roughly coursed wall of mortared sandstone, rising about forty centimetres above the altar top and extending no further than the altar's own length, as though it were built specifically to back it. Set into this short wall is an inscribed stone bearing an unusual design, the nature of which is not fully recorded. The topographer Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, noted that a church once stood near the round tower that still rises some sixteen metres to the south-west of the altar, and it is thought the altar may originally have belonged to that building. Round towers, familiar from early medieval Irish monastic sites, were free-standing bell towers and places of refuge; the one at Balla indicates a settlement of some ecclesiastical significance, though the church Lewis described has not survived in any recognisable form.

The altar sits within a graveyard that remains in use, and the round tower is visible nearby, making the spatial relationship between the two monuments easy to read on the ground. The inscribed stone built into the backing wall is worth examining closely, even if its design remains difficult to interpret.