Today only a single farmhouse remains on the site, along with a surviving arc of that original boundary in the eastern quadrant, a low bank about seventy centimetres high topped by a hedgerow. What makes this place quietly odd is the shape of it: a near-perfect circle defining what was once a tight cluster of five or six farmsteads, a form more readily associated with prehistoric ringforts than with post-medieval rural settlement.

The settlement at Ballyphilip is understood to date from after 1700, though it may be earlier. It belongs to a type known as a clachan, a nucleated rural settlement in which several farming families lived in close proximity, sharing a defined boundary rather than spreading across individual dispersed holdings. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 clearly records the circular enclosure with its cluster of farmhouses within, and the accompanying OS Namebook specifically notes the five or six dwellings it contained. What is less clear is whether the circular bank and hedgerow boundary was laid out to define the settlement from the beginning, or whether it predates the clachan entirely and was simply reused as a convenient boundary. The surviving buildings are single-storey, whitewashed outhouses of eighteenth or nineteenth century date, now standing alongside modern agricultural structures, the older fabric absorbed into a working farm without much ceremony.