It was identified not by someone walking the ground but from aerial photography, which is itself a clue to how thoroughly the feature has been absorbed into the landscape. The enclosure is nearly circular, measuring 72 metres north to south and 71 metres east to west, but its defining bank has been so flattened over time that in places it barely reads as archaeology at all. What survives is best preserved on the northern side, where the bank is around 5.5 metres wide, standing just 0.60 metres high on the outer face. Elsewhere, it has been quietly consumed: incorporated into a curved field boundary to the west, its material scraped away to build a farm bank; shaped into a simple scarp to the east, where the natural slope of the ground was enlisted to do some of the work.

Michael Connolly, whose 2008 doctoral thesis from University College Cork examined the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee, drew attention to something more than the structure itself. Positioned at 35 metres elevation on the ridge's crest, the enclosure commands a panorama that appears almost deliberate. To the north-east, the three main peaks of the Stacks Mountains are visible, along with the pass between Kilmore and Ballincollig Hill. To the south, the long spine of Sliabh Mis stretches from Baurtregaum in the west to Knockawaddra in the east. Connolly noted one detail that is particularly hard to dismiss as coincidence: a large cairn, a mound of stones typically used in prehistoric Ireland as a burial monument, sits on the saddle below Knockawaddra's summit. From the Ballingowan enclosure, a mountain spur in the foreground frames and underlines it. Drop to a lower elevation and the spur would block the cairn from view entirely. The enclosure's position was chosen, it seems, with some care for what could be seen from it.

The site is also neighboured by a large oval enclosure to the south that has never been formally recorded, separated from it by an east-west field wall. The Ballingowan enclosure itself carries no visible internal features and no trace of a ditch, leaving its precise function and date open. It sits, worn down and largely unmarked, on a ridge that still delivers exactly the views its builders apparently intended.