What survives is a raised rectangular platform on a natural ridge above the estuary of the River Finn, defined by a scarp between 1.6 and 2.3 metres high, a wide fosse or ditch running along its northern and western sides, and, near the centre of the interior, the low grass-covered outline of a rectangular building roughly 17 metres long. Its function is unrecorded; it may have been a barn or granary. The original entrance can still be traced as a depression in the scarp on the north-west side, with a causeway crossing the fosse and a now-blocked break in the outer bank beyond it.

The scholarly debate about this site is cautious almost to the point of agnosticism. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, considered doubtful the suggestion that a Cistercian community had briefly settled here at a place recorded as 'Ballinley or Ballinig' before moving on to found Boyle Abbey in County Roscommon. Boyle, established in 1161, became one of the most significant Cistercian houses in Ireland, and the idea that Ballinlig might have been an early stopping point on that journey is plausible enough to take seriously, even if the evidence does not settle the question. An alternative possibility is that the enclosure represents a grange, a working farm estate managed by a monastery to support its community, which Cistercian houses commonly established at some distance from the abbey itself. Two objects nudge the balance slightly toward some form of religious use: a stone stoup, a small basin used for holy water, is built into a field wall to the south-east of the site, and a possible font or benniter, a vessel similarly associated with liturgical practice, has ended up as a garden ornament at Ballinlig House about 200 metres to the north-west. Neither object proves anything on its own, but taken alongside the placename tradition they suggest that local memory has preserved something the landscape itself no longer makes legible.