At roughly 22 metres in diameter, it is not especially large, but its proportions are carefully readable once you know what to look for. The enclosing bank survives to an external height of 1.8 metres on its better-preserved arc, and a causewayed entrance, a deliberately left gap in the bank wide enough for people and livestock to pass through, opens to the west. A fosse, the ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, is still traceable for much of the circuit, though the southeastern section has been substantially backfilled by badger activity, the animals' spoil heaps quietly undoing what centuries of settlement had shaped.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when their banks and ditches were built from earth rather than stone, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the island. Most date to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications in any formal sense. The bank and fosse at Ballywalter would have defined a household's territory, offering a degree of security for people and animals alike, and the western entrance is a detail worth noting: orientating the opening away from the prevailing Atlantic weather was a practical consideration that recurs on sites across the country. The scarp to the east, around eight metres below the fort's level, would have added a further natural advantage to the position.

The interior, when surveyors recorded the site, was concealed beneath nettles standing between three-quarters of a metre and one and a half metres tall, which itself tells a story. Nettles are well known as indicators of disturbed or phosphate-rich ground, the kind of soil associated with long human occupation, animal penning, and the gradual accumulation of organic material over generations. The dense vegetation here is less an obstacle than a botanical signature of everything the ground beneath it once contained.