That asymmetry is part of what makes the site at Balleagny worth attention. Where many ringforts have been erased wholesale by modern farming, this one preserves a legible record of its own slow erosion, one half still earthworked and banked, the other reduced to little more than a subtle lift in the ground.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the dominant form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a homestead. This example is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric circuits: an inner bank, then a fosse (a ditch), then an outer bank beyond that. When described in detail in 1980, it measured roughly 41.5 metres north to south and 40.5 metres east to west, with the deep intervening fosse still clearly visible along its south-western to north-north-eastern arc. The outer bank along that same arc remains fairly substantial. Towards the north-east, east, and south-east, however, the perimeter has been levelled, leaving only a slight internal rise to hint at what once stood there. No original entrance survives. The interior is uneven, with a scattering of small depressions in the north-eastern and south-eastern quadrants. Just outside the outer bank, to the south-west and west, two small subrectangular enclosures are associated with the monument, their purpose unrecorded. The site appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a roughly circular earthwork, and again on the revised 1913 twenty-five-inch edition, by which point its shape had already become penannular, open on one side like a crescent. An estate map of the nearby Sonna Demesne, held in the National Library of Ireland, also captures it in its earlier, more complete form.

The surrounding field still carries the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges, the kind laid down by spade or plough in earlier centuries, and field boundaries to the north-east and south-west have since been removed. The monument as a whole reads as a palimpsest: traces of different periods of use and neglect layered one over another, with the deepest and oldest forms still just about decipherable from the ground.