What distinguishes it is a curious feature at its south-south-west entrance: a pair of parallel dry-stone walls, roughly fifteen metres long, running northward from the gap in the enclosing bank into the interior, where they terminate in a subrectangular enclosure. It is an arrangement that raises more questions than the landscape immediately answers.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the surrounding bank offering a degree of protection for livestock and household alike. This one at Ballymacgibbon is a roughly circular enclosure, forty-two metres across in both directions, bounded by a bank of earth and stone still standing about 1.1 metres high in places. The bank itself contains clearance material, stone gathered from the surrounding land over generations of agricultural use, which makes it difficult to read the monument in its original form. The parallel-walled entrance passage and the subrectangular area it leads to suggest a more deliberate internal organisation than is always found at such sites, though the heavily overgrown interior, also scattered with clearance material and a stone fence of later date, complicates any straightforward interpretation. A published survey of the Ballinrobe district, compiled by D. Lavelle and issued by the Lough Mask and Lough Carra Tourist Development Association in 1994, recorded these details, and they remain the clearest account of what survives.