Most ring barrows, the burial mounds that dot the Irish landscape, have their ditches on the outside of the enclosing bank. An internal ditch, however, is the defining characteristic of a henge, a type of prehistoric ceremonial monument more commonly associated with Britain. The presence of that inward-facing ditch at Ballyvarra means nobody is quite sure what they are looking at, and that uncertainty is part of what makes the site worth knowing about.

The monument was recorded as early as the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a large circular area enclosed by a bank and ditch. By the time the more detailed 1897 OS twenty-five-inch map was produced, surveyors could record the dimensions more precisely: an interior diameter of roughly 24 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, with the overall spread of the monument reaching approximately 62 metres at its widest. The enclosing ditch was around 10 metres wide, the bank about 4.2 metres, and traces of a second, outer ditch were visible along the northern and eastern sides. Field boundaries laid out after 1700 cut across the monument at its western and southern edges, suggesting that by the post-medieval period, whatever memory or significance the site once held had long been lost to the business of farming.

The monument sits in rough, poorly drained grassland roughly 80 metres north of the R506 and about 40 metres south of a local access road. The wetland setting is itself a clue worth considering; watery or marginal ground was often deliberately chosen for prehistoric ritual sites, and the boggy conditions here may have contributed to the monument's survival even as it became obscured. A Google Earth image from June 2018 shows the interior now heavily overgrown with trees, and drainage features are visible to the south-east. Getting close to the earthwork itself is likely to be muddy work in any season, and the tree cover means the circular form reads better from above than from ground level. For anyone with an interest in how prehistoric monuments are classified and debated, this is a site that raises more questions than it answers.