The rath here, a type of enclosed farmstead used across early medieval Ireland, was once a bivallate example, meaning it had two concentric banks and ditches rather than the single ring more commonly encountered. At some point in the years before the site was recorded in detail, it was levelled considerably, reducing what Mr Barry, a local man who remembered it in its earlier state, described as very high, steep banks with a very steep fosse. A fosse is the ditch cut outside an earthen bank, and here it once formed a significant barrier. What remains today is a raised D-shaped platform enclosed by a fosse roughly three metres wide, with the inner area still rising somewhere between 0.6 and 2.4 metres above the bottom of that ditch. The internal area spans about 27 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west.

The Ballingowan rath was recorded in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey compiled by C. Toal, published in 1995 by Brandon in association with the FÁS Training and Employment Authority. That survey catalogued a landscape thick with early medieval remains, and this site appeared as entry number 252. The earthwork is not unusual in its origins, early medieval raths were built by farming families of varying social rank and served as enclosed homesteads rather than military fortifications, but the degree of loss here gives the site a particular character. The testimony of Mr Barry, preserved in the survey, is a reminder that local memory sometimes holds information that no formal record captured in time. The view from the site, which the original survey notes as excellent across the surrounding countryside, suggests why this elevated position was chosen in the first place, commanding the kind of prospect that would have made good practical sense to whoever raised those now-vanished banks.