A circular raised area, roughly 27 metres across, sits on a gentle west-facing slope, its edges marked by a low scarp just 20 centimetres high. It is the kind of feature that a walker might cross without registering, but it is the remnant of a rath, the ringfort that served as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when thousands of such structures were built across Ireland to protect households, livestock, and status alike.

By 1976, when the site was first formally recorded, a fosse was still visible at the base of the scarp. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch, typically dug to reinforce the earthen bank or wall it surrounds, and its presence here would have made the enclosure considerably more substantial than what remains today. That ditch has since been infilled, and the southern half of the rath has been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural activity over the intervening decades. The original entrance, which in comparable sites often faced east and was sometimes elaborated with additional earthworks, is no longer recognisable at Ballymacshane.