It was first identified through aerial survey by a researcher named Swan, and the view from above reveals what is harder to appreciate on foot: a low bank tracing a circle roughly 160 metres across, one of the larger embanked enclosures of its type in the region. An embanked enclosure is broadly what the name suggests, a defined area bounded not by a ditch and internal bank in the manner of a typical ringfort, but by a broad, outward-facing bank, sometimes of considerable width. At Balrath, that bank was built not from cut stone or piled earth but from local gravel, a detail confirmed when quarrying in the east sliced through it and exposed a clean cross-section.

The monument was described in detail by Stout in 1991, and the picture that emerges is of a site worn down by both time and modern activity. In the south and south-east, quarrying and house construction have removed all trace of the earthwork. What survives best is a 45-metre segment in the north-north-west, flat-topped, up to 1.2 metres high and around 14 metres wide, which gives the clearest sense of how the whole circuit once looked. Stout noted that this profile closely resembles the embanked enclosure excavated at nearby Monknewtown by Sweetman in 1976. Geophysical survey has added further texture to the picture: a resistivity survey detected a possible curved ditch inside the northern arc of the bank, and in the western interior two horseshoe-shaped features were identified that may represent building foundations. Phosphate readings near the bank point to some kind of sustained human activity, while magnetic susceptibility results suggest structural remains may lie towards the centre of the enclosure. The underlying geology, Early Palaeozoic shale beneath glacial till and grey-brown podzolic soil, reflects the low-lying, ancient landscape in which the site sits. None of this has been excavated, and the enclosure's date and precise function remain open questions.