There is little left to see; the circular earthwork, along with its external fosse, the defensive ditch that would have enclosed the interior, has been destroyed in relatively recent times. What makes the loss slightly easier to trace is that even before its destruction, the fort was already in a poor state. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map was drawn up in the nineteenth century, the site was depicted not as a proper earthwork but as a mound, suggesting that the structural integrity of the rath had already been compromised well before modern agricultural activity finished the job. It appears as "Fort" on the Fair Plan, which at least confirms it was recognisable enough to be named.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They are among the most numerous field monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country, yet individual examples continue to be lost to land clearance and construction. The Ballineesteenig site is a quiet example of that pattern. What gives it a little more weight in the archaeological record is its proximity to an ogham stone, an upright stone inscribed with the early Irish alphabet known as ogham, which formerly stood approximately fifty metres to the east, within the same farmyard. That stone, recorded separately, is no longer standing in its original position. The association between a ringfort and a nearby ogham stone is not uncommon on the Dingle Peninsula, a region with an unusually dense concentration of early medieval inscribed stones, but the fact that both monuments here have effectively been absorbed into working farmland gives the site a particular kind of archaeological melancholy. J. Cuppage's 1986 survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region documented the site before its final disappearance, preserving at least a description of what had once been there.