The six-inch Ordnance Survey map of that year recorded it plainly as a quarry. The Fair Plan map produced in the same year, however, called it a fort. That disagreement, preserved in two documents from the same survey campaign, is the most telling thing about this site: it has been misread, reread, and worked over for so long that its original nature is genuinely uncertain.

The raised area measures roughly 27 metres from northeast to southwest and about 21 metres across in the other direction, defined by a scarp rather than by any built bank or fosse. A ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch and associated with early medieval settlement and farming, sits about 80 metres to the north-northwest, and it is possible that what survives at Ballygarvey is something similar in origin, or was once interpreted as such. The interior, however, has been heavily disturbed by quarrying, and the south and southwest end of the ridge has also been cut into. Much of the stone visible in the scarp and around the site appears to be natural rock outcrop rather than any constructed feature. There is no visible entrance. A stream runs around the base of the rise from the south-southwest, west, and north, and bogland lies about 330 metres to the south. Aerial photographs taken in November 2011 do show what reads as a circular enclosure, and an old field bank approaches the scarp from the east, suggesting the site was integrated into the surrounding agricultural landscape at some point. Whether it began as a ringfort that was later quarried, or whether the oval rise was always geological and simply quarried throughout, remains unresolved.