What makes it worth attention is not any single dramatic feature but the cluster of elements that survive together within a single enclosure, a church ruin, two graveslabs, and a holy well, all contained within an oval boundary measuring roughly 40 metres north to south and 72 metres from south-west to north-east.

The enclosure itself is the defining structure here. In early medieval Ireland, a cashel was a stone-walled enclosure used to define and protect a monastic or ecclesiastical space, functioning much as a bawn, a defensive stone courtyard, would later do in a secular context. A record from around 1900, cited in the archaeological notes compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, refers to the church as having been enclosed until that point and describes the surrounding boundary as a cashel, suggesting the stone wall was still a meaningful presence at the turn of the twentieth century. The graveslabs within the enclosure add a further layer; early Christian grave markers of this kind are often undecorated or simply incised, and their survival alongside the well and the church remains makes Ballyman a relatively coherent early ecclesiastical grouping rather than an isolated fragment.

The site sits in the Ballyman Glen area of south County Dublin, not far from Enniskerry and the Dublin and Wicklow border country. The valley setting means the approach can be damp underfoot, particularly after wet weather, and the enclosure itself is on sloping ground. The holy well, a spring or natural water source traditionally associated with a local saint and often visited for its reputed curative properties, is one of the elements most worth locating on a visit. Graveslabs can be difficult to spot if overgrown, so a visit in late winter or early spring, before the ground vegetation thickens, may give a clearer view of what remains within the enclosure boundary.