Visible only as a cropmark, a ghostly circular outline roughly thirty metres across appears in aerial photographs when differential growth in the soil above buried features causes crops or grass to darken or lighten in revealing patterns. What lies beneath is interpreted as a univallate enclosure, meaning a single-ditched circular boundary of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where such enclosures, often called raths or ringforts, once defined the domestic space of farming households. Nothing of it is visible on the ground.

What makes its situation particularly interesting is its proximity to another site. The Ballinaltig enclosure lies just one field to the north of a possible early ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of boundary that would typically have defined the precinct of an early Christian church or monastic settlement. The pairing of a secular-type enclosure with a nearby ecclesiastical one is not unusual in the Irish landscape; communities and their religious sites often developed in close relationship with one another. Whether the two enclosures at Ballinaltig were in use at the same time, or represent different phases of activity in the area, is not something the available evidence can currently answer.