No earthwork rises from the ground to catch a walker's eye; instead, the site survives as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried ditches and banks cause the vegetation above them to grow differently, revealing their outlines to a camera mounted in a low-flying aircraft. Two concentric fosses, the defensive ditches that typically surrounded a rath, show up clearly in aerial photographs, tracing a roughly circular enclosure approximately thirty metres in diameter. A faint cropmark of an internal bank is also visible. It is, in effect, an archaeological site that can only be properly read from the air.

Raths were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as enclosed farmsteads for families of some local standing. The double-fosse arrangement at Ballinaltig suggests a site of reasonable elaboration, since multiple concentric ditches generally indicate either higher status or a concern for additional security. The cropmarks were captured on two separate occasions, in aerial photographs taken in July 1975 and again in July 1989, the summer dry season being the period when differential crop growth makes buried features most legible. A separate enclosure lies roughly a hundred metres to the south-east, and traces of a field system survive to the south, suggesting that this small landscape once held more organised agricultural activity than the blank fields of today might suggest.