At forty-four metres in diameter, it is modest in scale, and what survives of it is fragmentary: a low bank, barely a quarter of a metre high on its interior face and rising to about a metre on the exterior, running from the north-east round through the south and back to the north-west, where it gives way to a natural scarp. A gap in the south-west looks to be of modern origin, probably the result of routine farm activity rather than any ancient entrance.

When surveyors examined it in January 1985, the bank was interrupted in places, and the most likely explanation was the uprooting of mature trees that had been growing along its course. This points to a secondary life for the site: it may originally have been a rath, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period into the first millennium AD, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch that enclosed a family's dwelling and perhaps a small yard. At some later point, the Belview enclosure appears to have been repurposed as a tree-ring, a practice of planting a circular grove, often on existing earthworks, that was common in post-medieval rural Ireland. Aerial imagery taken after 1985 shows the trees are now gone, leaving the earthwork in its current stripped-back state, the two phases of its use both partially erased.