Somewhere beneath ordinary Tipperary pasture at Ballynahinch, the outline of a roughly circular earthwork once measured around 38 metres across its longer axis, large enough to have enclosed a farmstead or settlement of some significance. Today, the southwestern portion has been completely levelled, ploughed or built away into nothing, while the northeastern arc survives only as a faint scar in the ground.

The enclosure was still visible enough in 1840 to be recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that invaluable snapshot of the Irish landscape taken before so much of it was altered by famine, drainage, and agricultural improvement. What the surveyors captured was a sub-circular form, a shape typical of the ringforts that once peppered the Irish countryside as the standard unit of early medieval rural settlement. A ringfort, at its simplest, is a roughly circular area defined by an earthen bank and a ditch, enclosing a farmstead or household. Here, the surviving northeastern section preserves just such features on a modest scale: a low scarp barely a tenth of a metre high and around a metre wide, accompanied by a fosse, the formal term for the outer ditch, roughly two and a half metres wide in total with a narrow base. These are slight dimensions, enough to give a sense of the original form but not enough to impress the casual eye.