Mature trees have colonised its bank, and along its southern and western edges the ancient earthwork has been pressed into service as an ordinary field fence, the boundary of an early medieval farmstead now doubling as a modern property line. A gap roughly one and a half metres wide survives to the north-north-west, probably the original entrance, and the interior is heavily overgrown, the ground within the ring left largely to itself.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, a form of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the sixth and tenth centuries. Constructed from earth rather than stone, a rath typically consisted of a raised circular bank, sometimes with one or more external ditches, enclosing a domestic area where a family and their livestock would have lived and sheltered. The Banteer example measures approximately thirty-eight metres across on its north-south axis. Its earthen bank still stands around ninety centimetres high on the interior face and just over a metre on the exterior, and a shallow fosse, the external ditch that accompanied the bank, survives along the east-south-east to south-south-west arc. These are modest but legible dimensions, enough to make clear that what looks at a glance like an overgrown hedge-line is in fact a coherent, if well-worn, early medieval structure.