It is roughly circular, about thirty metres across, and what survives above ground is an arc of ruined stone wall to the north, its eastern end absorbed into a later field boundary. Inside, a number of stones set upright on their edges and oriented to face east may mark burials, though no excavation appears to have confirmed this. The eastward orientation is suggestive; in early Christian and medieval Ireland, the dead were commonly laid out facing east, and the presence of such stones within a circular enclosure raises the possibility that this was once a burial ground, or at least that it served more than one purpose over time.

The enclosure was noted on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means it was already a visible feature in the landscape when the first systematic mapping of Ireland was undertaken in the nineteenth century. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes called ringforts or raths depending on their construction and likely use, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with an estimated fifty thousand or more recorded across the country. Most date to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and typically served as enclosed farmsteads. The Ballyvonane example is modest in scale and sufficiently ruined that its original character is difficult to read with confidence, but the possible burial stones in the interior give it a different quality from a straightforward domestic site.