There is no visible fosse, the ditch that typically encircles such enclosures, and no discernible entrance. What remains is a grass-covered disc of ground, roughly 27 metres across, defined only by low scarps between 0.8 and 1.2 metres high, the subtle step where the interior platform meets the surrounding land.

Ringforts, known variously as raths or lios across Ireland, were the most common form of rural settlement during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, and several thousand survive across the country in varying states of preservation. Most are defined by an earthen bank and an external ditch, so the absence of both here at Ballyscartin gives the site an unusually stripped-back appearance. Whether those features were always absent, were levelled by centuries of agricultural use, or simply never read clearly on this particular terrain is difficult to say without excavation. What is certain is that the site barely registers in the cartographic record: it appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map and seemingly not before, which says less about when the earthwork was made than about when surveyors chose to note it down.