What remains is a roughly circular enclosure, about thirty metres across on its north-south axis and thirty-eight metres east to west, defined less by a standing bank than by a low scarp, in places only thirty centimetres high. This is what early medieval settlement looks like when the land has been working steadily against it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were the standard form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised earthen bank and external ditch encircling a domestic area. This one at Ballincurry may originally have been bivallate, meaning it had two concentric banks and ditches rather than one, a form generally associated with higher-status households. The outer fosse, the ditch that ran around the outside of the bank, is still traceable from the south around through the west to the north, with a base width of around one and a half metres, though it has been cut across on its eastern side by a later field boundary running on a north-south axis. A faint suggestion of a second bank survives at the southern end only. The cumulative effect of agricultural improvement over generations has reduced what may have been a moderately substantial enclosure to something that reads, on the ground, more as a slight unevenness in the grass than as a structure.

The site sits on rising ground with open views in all directions, which would have made reasonable sense for a farming settlement concerned with both land management and visibility across the surrounding landscape. The eastern aspect of the slope means the interior would have caught morning light, a practical consideration that seems to have mattered to those choosing locations for such enclosures across Ireland.