The enclosure at Ballinglin was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1839, which gives it an outer diameter of around 45 metres, yet on the ground today the visible area is somewhat smaller, roughly 32 metres across, defined by little more than a slight scarp and the faint trace of a fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically dug to define or defend an enclosed space, and here its remains survive only partially, running in a southeast to northwest direction with a top width of around 10 metres. What the ground obscures, aerial photographs have revealed more clearly, showing a wide fosse feature as a vegetation mark, where subtle differences in soil moisture and plant growth trace the outline of something that human activity once imposed on this landscape.

The site sits on a col, the low saddle of land connecting two higher points, on an east to west ridge about a kilometre long between Ask Hill to the west and Tara Hill to the east, their summits lying roughly 900 metres and a kilometre away respectively. That position, between two named hills on a natural crossing point, may not be coincidental. Embanked enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland and can belong to a wide range of periods and functions, from early medieval settlement enclosures to ceremonial sites of much greater antiquity. Without excavation, this one resists easy classification. What can be said is that by 1839 it was sufficiently visible to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey, and that its outline has since softened considerably, a process of erasure that the aerial record has partially arrested.