The site was never recorded on Ordnance Survey Ireland's historic maps, and by the time satellite imagery was captured between 2011 and 2018, nothing was visible from above at all. What survives, or survived, is essentially a ghost in the landscape, known to archaeology largely because a low-flying survey camera happened to pass over at the right moment.

A ring barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric origin, typically consisting of a central mound enclosed by a surrounding ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. The Ballyblake example is modest even by those standards: the central mound measures just five metres in diameter, the fosse around it roughly two and a half metres wide and thirty centimetres deep, with a two-metre external bank completing the circuit. It sits on a natural rise within a shallow north-to-south depression in low-lying improved pasture, with open views to the north and south. Two related ring barrows are recorded immediately to the east and south-east, suggesting this was once a small cluster of funerary monuments rather than an isolated feature. The site was first identified as a circular cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration that appears in aerial photographs when buried earthworks affect how grass grows above them, during the Bruff aerial photographic survey in 1986, recorded as Bruff AP 4/3694. The record was compiled by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly and uploaded to the national monuments database in September 2020.

Because the monument is not currently visible on satellite imagery or, it seems, easily discernible at ground level, a visit requires some patience and a tolerance for ambiguity. The site lies in agricultural pasture, so access would depend on landowner permission. Cropmarks of this kind are most likely to show in a dry summer, when soil moisture differences above buried features become pronounced, making late July or August the period when any surface trace is most plausible. If you do reach the general area, the natural rise and the long views northward give some sense of why this particular spot was chosen, whatever the precise period or purpose. The monuments to the east and south-east, catalogued separately as LI023-193001 and LI023-193002, suggest the broader field repays careful attention even when individual features refuse to announce themselves.