The site at Ballywalter is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by its stone enclosure wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one retains much of its original facing despite the centuries of neglect that have reduced its height to little more than half a metre in places. The subcircular enclosure measures nearly forty metres across, and the wall itself sits on a bank of earth and stone roughly five metres wide, giving the whole structure a solidity that vegetation has obscured but not entirely erased.

Ringforts of this kind were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock, often with ancillary structures within the enclosure. At Ballywalter, two features inside the cashel suggest it was more than a simple cattle pen. In the western half of the interior, a shallow circular depression, about four and a half metres across and thirty centimetres deep, may be the collapsed entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used for storage or as a place of refuge. At the centre of the enclosure, a low rectangular structure measuring roughly seven metres by four metres has been identified as a possible hut site, the footprint of a dwelling whose walls now barely clear the ground. The description of the site was compiled by D. Lavelle for an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, published in 1994 by the Lough Mask and Lough Carra Tourist Development Association.

The wall and interior are described as heavily overgrown, so reading the archaeology on the ground requires some patience. The south-facing slope and slight rise on which the cashel sits are typical choices for early settlement, offering drainage, shelter, and a degree of visibility over the surrounding terrain. Those details, modest as they are, connect this particular field corner to a pattern of land use that once extended across the whole of rural Ireland.