The earthwork occupies a low hillock in open grassland, commanding clear views in every direction, with a stream running close along its southern and eastern sides. Yet despite that openness in the landscape around it, the interior is almost entirely swallowed by trees and vegetation, leaving the structure as something you can measure and trace from the outside more easily than you can enter and explore.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period in Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth century, and typically used as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing. The Ballintogher example is a substantial one. Its raised interior platform measures approximately 36 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, making it considerably wider than average. Around that interior runs an earth and stone bank, and beyond the bank a wide, flat-bottomed outer fosse, the term for the ditch that would originally have reinforced the defensive line of the bank above it. At its best-preserved point, on the northern arc, the external face of the bank rises about 1.6 metres above the base of the fosse. A cattle gap, a deliberate break in the bank roughly two metres wide, sits at the northern side, and while such openings are sometimes later insertions made by farmers incorporating an ancient earthwork into their field systems, they can also reflect original entranceways that were widened over generations of agricultural use.

The northern section is where the structure repays the most attention, both because the bank and fosse are clearest there and because the heavy growth of trees elsewhere makes any close inspection of the rest of the perimeter difficult. The stream to the south and east would once have contributed to the defensive and practical character of the site, and its presence suggests the location was chosen with some care, combining elevated ground with a reliable water source close at hand.