The earthwork has been levelled almost entirely into the surrounding pasture, leaving only a low circular rise, roughly 31 metres north to south and just under 30 metres east to west, tracing the ghost of what was once a defined enclosure. A rath, to use the Irish term, was a circular earthen enclosure, typically banked and ditched, that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across Ireland, and thousands have been softened or erased by centuries of agriculture.

The site was clear enough when the Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1842, with the western half of the enclosure recorded as a semi-circular arc with hachuring, and the eastern half indicated though less distinctly. That cartographic record is now one of the more reliable traces of what stood here. What makes the Ballynoe example quietly notable is its company: two further circular enclosures sit approximately 100 metres to the west and southwest respectively. Such clustering of ringforts within close range of one another is not unusual in Cork, and may point to related family groups, successive occupation, or simply the long-term agricultural appeal of a particular slope. This one faces north, set into pasture ground that has done its slow work of absorption over many generations.