It takes a deliberate eye to read it at all: an oval area roughly 35 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, its perimeter partly absorbed into a curvilinear field boundary and partly smothered by dense, impenetrable growth. What remains of the defining bank is so thoroughly incorporated into the modern field system that it is difficult to say where the old monument ends and the working farm begins.

The site survives, such as it does, as very low traces of a levelled scarp, no more than 15 centimetres high and around 5 metres wide along its northern and eastern arc. Enclosures of this kind, roughly oval or circular earthworks defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, are among the most common prehistoric and early medieval monument types in Ireland, used variously as settlement enclosures, farmsteads, or ceremonial spaces, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. At Ballydonnell, the interior slopes gently down toward the east and has long since been folded into the surrounding pasture. Local knowledge adds a melancholy footnote: field boundaries to the north and east were removed in recent decades as part of land improvement schemes, stripping away whatever additional context those boundaries might have preserved.