Roughly 18 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, the earthwork sits enclosed by a fosse, a shallow ditch that traces its perimeter, and is the kind of thing that could easily be walked past without a second thought. It does not appear on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map, which means that whatever it represents, the early nineteenth-century surveyors either did not consider it worth recording or, more intriguingly, it had not yet taken its present form.

The feature was recorded by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the survey database in May 2021, drawing on the Cassini edition of the OSi six-inch map, where it appears as a distinct raised oval enclosed by that surrounding ditch. Aerial and satellite imagery tells a similar story in a different register: orthophotos taken between 2005 and 2012, and a Google Earth image dated 14 September 2019, show the outline as a cropmark, the kind of subtle difference in grass or crop growth that betrays buried or disturbed ground beneath the surface. A cropmark forms when buried features such as ditches or banks affect how plants grow above them, producing tonal variation visible only from above. Some scrub now partially covers the outline. The notes raise the possibility that this is not an ancient monument at all but a landscape feature or tree-ring associated with Ballinstona Cottage, which sits immediately to the north.

The earthwork lies in pasture about 200 metres northeast of the ruins of Ballinstona House, and immediately south of Ballinstona Cottage. Access to private farmland in Ireland requires permission from the landowner, and there is little here that would be legible at ground level without some prior knowledge of what to look for. The cropmark is best appreciated from aerial imagery rather than on foot, and the Google Earth orthoimage from September 2019 gives the clearest sense of the oval outline. Given that its origins remain unresolved, somewhere between a possible antiquity and a more recent garden or planting feature, it sits in that quietly unresolved category of Irish field monuments that accumulates slowly, one survey record at a time.