The rest has gone over the edge, claimed by the slow erosion of a clifftop ridge above the Finne Estuary in Ballysadare Bay, Co. Sligo. What remains is a D-shaped platform, roughly 22.7 metres along its longer axis and 9.8 metres across, sitting atop a steep-sided mound of earth and stone. On the estuary-facing side, a severely eroded linear cliff face marks where the land has simply fallen away. On the landward sides, a scarp between 3.4 and 3.6 metres high still holds its shape, and at the base of that scarp runs a fosse, the defensive ditch that once ringed the whole structure, now measuring up to 12 metres wide and 2 metres deep, flat-bottomed and steep-sided, still legible despite everything.

The site is the remnant of a rath, the Irish term for a raised ringfort, a class of enclosed settlement built across Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and the early centuries of the second millennium. Raths were typically circular earthen enclosures, defined by one or more banks and ditches, and used as farmsteads or high-status residences. The Ballinlig example appears to have been a small one, and the combination of its coastal ridge position and the progressive cliff erosion has reduced what survives to the north-western arc of the original structure. No original entrance can be identified in what remains, which is itself telling: the entrance, along with most of the eastern and southern sections, has almost certainly been lost to the same erosion that shaped the cliff face now defining the site's eastern edge. The fosse and the low bank at the upper edge of the scarp are the clearest indicators of the rath's former extent and form.