The circle at Boleycarrigeen sits within forestry on a low east-west ridge in County Wicklow, eleven upright stones arranged around an interior roughly thirteen and a half metres across, set on the inner edge of a low earthen bank. What gives the site its particular character is a deliberate graduation in height: the stones are shortest near the entrance at the south-south-west, around 1.3 metres, and grow progressively taller as they curve around to the north-north-east, where the tallest stone reaches close to 1.9 metres, pointed in profile, with a flat inner face carrying natural weathering marks that run vertically down it. A possible axial stone, small and recumbent, lies due north. The north-west quadrant is missing its stones entirely, and what may be a fallen stone sits partially buried in the bank near the tallest upright.

When Liam Price recorded the site in 1934, he found eleven stones standing and a twelfth reduced to a stump nearly level with the ground. The scholar Aubrey Burl later estimated that the original circle may have comprised as many as eighteen stones, all of local shale or grit, and drew attention to the earthen bank encircling them, which he put at roughly 1.8 metres wide and 0.9 metres high in its better-preserved sections. An embanked stone circle is one in which the uprights stand not in open ground but on or just inside a continuous earthwork ring, a form that distinguishes a particular cluster of prehistoric monuments in the Wicklow and Kildare uplands. Boleycarrigeen is considered one of the finer examples of this regional group, alongside Castleruddery, a National Monument located a little over five kilometres to the north-west. The site occupies the highest point of a pass between Brusselstown Ring to the west, at around 405 metres, and Keadeen Mountain to the east, which rises to 654 metres, and a tumulus lies just 75 metres to the east, suggesting the area held sustained ceremonial significance. The monument has been protected under a preservation order since 1940.

The circle sits within forestry, and a winter visit, when the canopy is thinner, makes the low encircling bank easier to read in the landscape. The entrance gap at the south-south-west is about 1.3 metres wide, narrow enough to feel deliberate, and once inside the circuit the graduation in stone height from entrance to the tall north-east stone becomes apparent as you move around the ring.