That understatement is part of what makes it interesting. The enclosure sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it has been divided, worked, and reworked across several distinct eras, and the enclosure itself is simply one layer among many, neither obviously dominant nor obviously peripheral.

The structure is subcircular, measuring roughly 28 metres east to west and just over 25 metres north to south on the interior. Its bank, composed of earth and stone with a rounded profile, reaches a base width of between four and four and a half metres, though its height varies considerably: only about 25 centimetres on the interior face, but up to a metre and a half on the exterior in places, suggesting the ground outside drops away or that material was piled more generously on that side. Enclosures of this general type, often called ringforts, were a common form of rural settlement and farmstead enclosure in early medieval Ireland, typically used to define a homestead and provide some degree of protection for people and animals. What lifts Ballyinsheen More slightly out of the ordinary is what extends from its northern arc: two parallel walls, now collapsed and grass-covered, run northward from the enclosure's northwest and northeast sides. Between these walls, several depressions in the ground are thought to be the result of quarrying, which gives the area a faintly industrial character that sits at an odd angle to the pastoral setting. Limestone outcrops throughout the surrounding land, so the raw material was evidently close at hand. An aerial photograph taken by Markus Casey in 1998 captures the monument from the west-southwest, and from that elevation the relationship between the enclosure and its flanking walls becomes legible in a way that is difficult to appreciate from ground level.