What makes it slightly unusual among the thousands of raths scattered across Ireland is its scale and form. A ringfort, or rath, is typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches; most are modest in size. This one is considerably more substantial.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1840, it appeared on the six-inch sheet as a raised oval area defined by a scarp. By the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition, it was recorded as a circular platform roughly 28 metres in diameter, with an outer fosse running from the south-east around through south, west, north, and north-east. The more detailed description comes from O'Kelly, writing in 1944, who classified it as a Type C Earthwork: a high circular mound surrounded by a fosse, with an overall diameter of 160 feet (approximately 48.7 metres) and a mound height of 12 feet (around 3.6 metres). O'Kelly noted that the eastern side had been partially dug away, causing the mound's top, which appears to have originally been flat, to slope in that direction, and erasing the fosse on that side entirely.

The site sits in pasture land close to the meeting point of four townlands, Ballinstona South, Ballynamona, Baunageeragh, and Cottage, a detail that hints at how these ancient boundaries may have been drawn around, or in relation to, existing earthworks. The eastern breach, visible on Google Earth imagery as a broken-out gap in the bank, is a reminder that agricultural activity has taken its toll, though the bulk of the monument survives well. Anyone approaching on foot should expect to be moving through working farmland and will need to seek appropriate access. The mound itself is most easily read from a slight distance, where the relationship between the raised platform and the encircling fosse becomes clear. Aerial images from the 2005 to 2012 Ordnance Survey orthophoto series confirm the monument is still well defined from above, and even at ground level the earthwork has a quiet presence that the surrounding grazing land does nothing to diminish.