The earthwork sits at around 118 metres above sea level, commanding clear views in every direction, with Lough Owel visible to the north-east. It is the kind of elevated, open position that would have made the site useful to whoever enclosed it, and which still gives the slight remains a quiet sense of purpose.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are the most common class of monument in the Irish landscape, typically dating from the early medieval period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They functioned as enclosed farmsteads, their banks and ditches defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock. The Ballard example is oval rather than perfectly circular, measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west. What survives is a double-bank arrangement: an inner bank, an intervening fosse (a ditch cut between two banks), and a lower outer bank beyond that. When the site was described in 1983, the western and north-western arc was the best-preserved section, with the inner bank rising steeply to between two and two and a half metres on its exterior face. The fosse between the banks remained reasonably well defined at that point, up to a metre deep in places. A quarry pit had already encroached from the south-west, and the entire northern and eastern perimeter had been levelled at some earlier stage, so the surviving earthwork is essentially a partial arc rather than a complete enclosure. The monument appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, where it is shown as a roughly circular earthwork, and again on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913, by which point its oval shape is more clearly recorded within a small sub-rectangular field boundary.

Aerial photography shows the fort today as partially tree-lined, open and disturbed to the east-north-east where the damage is most pronounced. The western arc, with its steeper surviving banks, is the portion most worth examining on the ground, where the relationship between inner bank, fosse, and outer bank can still be read, even if agriculture has done its best over the decades to obscure it.