This ditch barrow, a type of funerary mound enclosed by a shallow surrounding ditch called a fosse, rises barely fifteen centimetres above the ground at its highest point. Its roughly circular raised area measures just over five metres across, and the fosse enclosing it is no deeper than fourteen centimetres below the external ground level. There is no outer bank to speak of, partly because the natural ground rises gently to the east and south, absorbing what might otherwise have been a more defined edge. The monument asks a great deal of the eye.

The site was identified through aerial photography by Doody, the photograph catalogued as Bruff 58, aerial photograph 2133, and it is this overhead perspective that reveals the fosse as a coherent circle where ground-level inspection might register nothing more than a slight unevenness in the soil. What makes the Ballywire example particularly interesting is its relationship to the monuments around it. A standing stone is visible roughly 86 metres to the south-southeast, positioned on the summit of the same gentle hillock at whose northern foot the barrow sits. Further to the south lie two additional burial monuments: a ring-barrow approximately 184 metres away, and a stepped barrow around 260 metres distant. A stepped barrow, as the name suggests, is a mound constructed in tiered levels rather than a smooth rise. Together, these features suggest that this quiet corner of Tipperary was once a deliberately composed ritual or funerary landscape, with a stream running roughly northeast to southwest some 70 metres to the northwest providing a natural boundary to the grouping.