The ringfort at Ballinkeeny has been levelled, its earthworks replaced by a modern quarry that occupies the very ground where the monument once stood. It is a fairly stark example of something that happened across Ireland with some regularity during the twentieth century, as land use shifted and the low, grassy banks of a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, were seen as obstacles rather than antiquities.

What makes Ballinkeeny particularly interesting, despite the loss of the central enclosure, is the complexity of what surrounded it. Immediately to the west lay a large roughly circular area of about fifty-five metres in diameter, enclosed by a low bank, with what appears to have been a house site at its centre. A second possible house site adjoined the ringfort bank to the west-southwest, and a rectangular structure that may also have been a house site sat just outside the bank to the east. This kind of cluster, a principal enclosure accompanied by satellite structures and associated habitation areas, is not unusual in the ringfort tradition, and it suggests that Ballinkeeny was once a reasonably substantial rural settlement rather than a simple single-family enclosure. Old field boundaries have also encroached on the site from the south, west, and north, layering later agricultural patterns across what remains of the earlier landscape. The site commands wide views of the surrounding countryside, which would have been a practical consideration for whoever originally chose the location.