This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosure in the country, typically built between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries as a farmstead or small defended settlement. What makes the Ballard example worth pausing over is the completeness of its arrangement: an inner bank, a fosse between it and an outer bank, and a carefully engineered entrance on the south-eastern side, where a causeway 3.5 metres wide and 0.7 metres high carries the old approach across the ditch.

The site sits on the west-facing slope of a prominent ridge, positioned to command wide views to the north, west, and south, with slightly higher ground behind it to the east. When described in detail in 1980, the enclosure measured roughly 29.5 metres north-west to south-east and 27 metres north-east to south-west. The inner bank of earth and stone had by then worn down almost to a simple scarp in places, though traces of stone facing remained visible along the southern arc. The fosse, the broad ditch separating the two banks, was in notably better condition, described as wide and deep and well preserved. The outer bank also retained fragments of facing stone both inside and out, despite several disturbance gaps. The interior itself is uneven, rising toward the centre from the south and south-east, a detail that hints at buried structure or deliberate shaping. Both the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition record the enclosure, confirming it was still a recognisable feature of the landscape through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

From the air, the ringfort now appears as a roughly circular tree-lined enclosure, the vegetation following the old earthworks and making it visible even where the banks themselves have softened into the ground. The entrance gap in the outer bank is wider than the causeway itself, at 5.5 metres, suggesting the original approach had some breadth to it, perhaps enough for livestock as well as people, which would be entirely consistent with what ringforts are generally understood to have been: working farmsteads as much as defended retreats.