It measures thirty-four metres across, defined by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the ditch that would once have reinforced the bank's defensive or enclosing function. The bank itself survives to between twenty centimetres and half a metre in height, and the fosse beside it still holds a discernible depth. These are modest dimensions, but the proportions are recognisable: this is a rath, the everyday term for the kind of ringfort that once served as a farmstead enclosure across early medieval Ireland, probably in use somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries.

Ringforts of this kind were not primarily military structures. They were the enclosed homesteads of farming families, the bank and ditch marking a boundary between the domestic interior and the wider agricultural world outside. At Balisland, the entrance gap, three metres wide, faces north-east, a directional choice that appears with some regularity in Irish ringforts and may reflect practical, social, or symbolic preferences of the period. What the interior once held, whether timber buildings, a souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage sometimes used for storage or refuge), or other features, is not currently visible at ground level. The site shows no indication of surviving internal structures.