A roughly circular area, measuring about 25.8 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, sits on an east-facing slope just below the brow of a hill in Ballykenry, County Limerick. It is the kind of site that rewards a careful eye rather than a casual glance.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most consist of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a domestic area. This one at Ballykenry is more elaborately defended than many. The enclosing earthen bank stands 1.8 metres high on its exterior face, which is a reasonable height by any standard, but the builders did not stop there. Around much of the circuit there is also an external fosse, a defensive ditch, cut to 0.7 metres deep and 1.2 metres wide, running from the south-west around to the east. Beyond that sits a low counterscarp bank of earth and stone, which is the small raised edge left on the outer lip of a ditch to slow an approach further. On the north side, where the bank gives way, the ground has been scarped, meaning cut or shaped into a steep face, producing a drop of 0.8 metres. The combination of bank, ditch, and counterscarp on different sections of the perimeter suggests a site whose occupants were attentive to the risks of the landscape around them. A second ringfort, recorded separately, lies approximately 30 metres to the south-south-west, which raises the possibility that the two enclosures functioned in some relationship to one another, though the nature of that relationship is not recorded.

The interior is now overgrown with trees and bushes, and the ground slopes downward toward the east, which would have made the site less visible from that direction and perhaps gave occupants an advantage in watching approaching movement below. A field boundary follows the outer edge of the fosse from the south-west to the north-west, meaning the modern agricultural landscape has absorbed the monument into its own geometry in a way that is easy to miss without knowing what to look for. Aerial photographs taken in March 2006 for the Archaeological Survey of Ireland provide the clearest overview of the full circuit. On the ground, the earthwork is in pasture, so access depends on landowner permission, and the overgrown interior makes close inspection of the interior surface difficult.