The site at Ballyhugh is a cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a stone rather than earthen wall, and it measures roughly forty metres across. Most of what defined it is now a tumbled line of stone, clearest along the arc running from the south-east through south to north-west, and increasingly obscured by vegetation everywhere else. A gap of about seven metres on the north-west side may look like an original entrance but is more likely a modern breach.

Inside the enclosure, just north-north-west of centre, sits an oval mound of collapsed stone, the remnant of some internal structure whose original purpose is now difficult to read from the surface alone. To the south of this mound is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly built in early medieval Ireland, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. Souterrains are frequently found in association with cashels, and their presence here suggests the site was once a functioning farmstead, probably dating to somewhere in the early medieval period, though the notes attach no specific date to it.