It is easy to miss. The headland in question is barely thirty metres long and twenty-five metres wide, a modest rectangle of flat ground where the only visible sign of former human intention is a slight depression cutting across the neck of the promontory, the remnant of a fosse. A fosse is simply a defensive ditch, typically dug to slow or discourage approach to a defended position, and here that ditch would have separated the headland from the mainland behind it. The surrounding cliffs are low, and the sea cannot be reached from the interior of the enclosure, giving the place a curiously landlocked quality despite its coastal setting.

A survey carried out in 2002 by Casey recorded the site within a landscape of coarse bog and poorly drained unimproved pasture, with higher ground rising to the north and a heavily indented shoreline stretching out to the south. The promontory fort, a class of monument found widely along the Irish Atlantic coast and typically associated with the Iron Age, uses natural coastal geography to provide defence on most sides while a constructed barrier, usually a bank and ditch, closes off the landward approach. At Ballydavid Head, that barrier survives only in outline. A later land-commission field boundary, the kind of boundary drawn up during nineteenth and early twentieth century land redistribution schemes, now runs around the perimeter of the headland and cuts across the same neck of land, complicating the picture. Where the original fosse remains, its cutting is intermittently visible in the cliff section, glimpsed in profile rather than from above, which is itself a small reminder of how much coastal erosion can reveal through sheer accident what centuries of vegetation and agricultural activity have otherwise obscured.