This is a ring barrow, a type of Bronze Age burial monument in which a central mound is enclosed by a ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. The one at Ballynorig is a substantial example: the whole structure stretches to an external diameter of roughly 37 metres, with the inner platform measuring around 14 metres east to west. The fosse averages 5 metres in width, and the encircling bank rises to 1.2 metres on its outer face. It is the kind of thing that reads, from a distance, as a slight rise in an ordinary field.

The site may be the same one partly excavated in 1943 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, one of the most significant Irish archaeologists of the twentieth century. If so, what he found was modest but telling: some stones that could represent the remnants of a kerb, the low ring of upright or recumbent stones that often framed Bronze Age burial mounds; cremated bones, apparently sheltered beneath three stone slabs; and two flint flakes. Cremation was a common burial practice during the Bronze Age in Ireland, and the protective arrangement of slabs over the remains suggests deliberate and careful interment rather than casual deposition. The flint flakes, worked fragments of a stone not naturally occurring in Kerry in any quantity, hint at the wider networks of material exchange that connected these communities. The northern and eastern portions of the outer bank have since been levelled entirely, and the fosse in those sections is now difficult to trace, with two gaps of roughly 2 metres breaking the bank to the south-east and south-west.