It does not announce itself dramatically. What makes it quietly remarkable is the survival, however eroded, of a double-banked ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland and formed the basic unit of early medieval rural life. A ringfort, or rath, typically consisted of one or more circular earthen banks with a ditch, enclosing a domestic space where a farming family lived, kept livestock, and stored goods. The presence of two banks at Beltacken, with a fosse between them, suggests this was a settlement of some local standing.

When surveyors recorded the site in 1980, they found an irregular oval roughly 22.5 metres east to west and 18 metres north to south. The inner bank, constructed of earth and stone, survives best along the eastern and east-north-eastern arc, where it still reads as a proper bank, but fades around the southern and western sides to little more than grass-covered stone wall footings. The fosse, the defensive ditch between the two banks, cuts a deep U-shape in section for most of its circuit, though it becomes noticeably shallower toward the south-east, a quirk that may owe something to the natural ridge pushing into the site from that direction rather than to any deliberate construction choice. The original entrance is still legible at the south-east: a causeway four metres wide and 0.7 metres high spans the fosse, with corresponding gaps of roughly 2.4 metres and 2.8 metres cut through the inner and outer banks on either side. The outer bank retains traces of internal stone facing on the east. Later agricultural field banks have been added against the outer bank at the west and north-west, forming a small triangular enclosure that abutts the earlier monument, a reminder that farmers in subsequent centuries found the existing earthwork a convenient boundary to build from. The site appeared as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, and as a roughly oval earthwork on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, its form shifting slightly with each recorder's eye and the slow attrition of time.