The site is classified as a possible rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands once existed across Ireland; many have been ploughed flat, built over, or eroded into near-invisibility, and this one in Ballindoo is very much in that category.

The record of its disappearance can be traced across two Ordnance Survey maps. The 1838 six-inch edition shows a clearly defined circular embanked enclosure, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres in diameter, sitting at the western end of an east-west ridge with a steep drop to the west and a broad view over bog stretching to the south-west. By the 1920 edition, the depiction had already changed: only a semicircular hachured arc survived on paper, curving from south through west to north, and a possible external fosse, a shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank's defensive function, was visible on the north-western arc. Even that remnant had been cut across by a field boundary running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, suggesting the enclosure was being progressively dismantled or absorbed into the working landscape of the surrounding pasture. Today the earthwork has been levelled entirely. Approximately one hundred metres to the south-east, a bowl barrow, a type of Bronze Age burial mound, survives as a separate monument, hinting that this ridge had drawn people to it across multiple periods long before the rath was ever built.