A rath, the common Irish term for a ringfort, was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across Ireland, and many have been erased by centuries of agriculture. This one in Balling sits in level grassland and has not fared well.

The surviving earthworks describe only a partial arc. A bank can still be traced from the south-east, around through the west, and up to the north, spanning a circle roughly 32 metres in diameter. From the north around to the east-south-east, nothing remains visible above ground. A field wall, built at some later date, overlies the earthworks at the south-east, compounding the erasure. On the more intact western to northern side, an external fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the outside of the bank, can still be made out. What survives, in other words, is less than half the original circuit, and that half is itself degraded.

There is something worth pausing over in a site this fragmentary. The rath at Balling is not unusual because it is well preserved or dramatically sited; it is unusual precisely because it represents the quieter fate of most ringforts, slowly consumed by the working landscape around them until a field wall and a shallow depression are all that is left of what was once someone's home ground.