That stone may mark the original entrance to a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Ringforts, or raths, are common enough across the island, but this one has a few details that reward closer attention.

The enclosure at Balgarrett is substantial, measuring some 64 metres in diameter, which places it towards the larger end of the ringfort scale. A bank of earth and stone, standing between one and one and a half metres high for most of its circuit, defines the boundary, and unusually there is no evidence of an external ditch, which is a feature found at many comparable sites. The bank itself has been incorporated into a modern field fence along part of its eastern arc, the kind of quiet absorption that happens when farmland quietly swallows older boundaries over generations. The monument does not appear on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, though by the 1913 twenty-five-inch edition it is recorded as a subcircular earthwork. When the site was examined and described in 1983, surveyors noted that the interior is covered in cultivation ridges, the low parallel mounds left by ridge-and-furrow tillage, suggesting the ground inside was worked at some point after the ringfort fell out of its original use. At the centre, a natural hillock survives with the remains of two house foundations, and there are indications of a probable internal division along the eastern side of the enclosure, hinting at the kind of organised domestic arrangement that would have housed a farming family and their animals behind the protective bank.