No entrance gap, no standing stones, no dramatic mound. What you get instead is a gently raised ring of ground, roughly twenty metres across, defined by a slight scarp, a sloping edge in the earth barely more than half a metre high, that traces an almost complete circle and then simply stops, open to the south-east. That gap, and the shape it produces, is the detail that makes this monument legible: it is a penannular earthwork, meaning ring-shaped but deliberately incomplete, like a circle with a segment removed.

The monument was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map as far back as the 1897 edition, which fixes it in the landscape at least that far. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited and formally described it in 1999, measuring the raised area at 20 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, with the defining scarp running to about three metres in width. The interior was found to be dry, clear of overgrowth, and carrying a slight southward tilt that follows the natural lie of the slope. A field boundary runs north to south along the outer base of the scarp on the east side. Aerial photography taken between 2005 and 2018, from Ordnance Survey Ireland, Digital Globe, and Google Earth sources, reveals something the ground survey cannot easily show: a circular cropmark with an annexe feature adjoining from the west and north-west, suggesting the monument may have had a more complex plan than its surface remains imply. Two further enclosures sit nearby, one roughly 105 metres to the south-east and another around 130 metres to the east, hinting at a broader pattern of activity in this part of the townland. A land drain immediately to the east marks the boundary between Ballyvalode and the neighbouring townland of Moanroe.

The earthwork sits on a low rise in pasture ground, so access is likely to depend on the usual courtesies of crossing farmland. The position gives open views across a wide arc, from the north-west around through north and north-east, and again from the south-east through south to south-west, which may have been as relevant to whoever used this place as anything buried beneath it. The cropmark evidence is best appreciated through the aerial imagery available on the National Monuments Service's online mapping tools, where the annexe feature and the relationship to the surrounding enclosures come into sharper focus than any ground-level visit can provide.