What survives here is a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular enclosure built from earth and used, most likely during the early medieval period, as a defended farmstead or the residence of a person of local standing. This example at Ballinlough is modest in diameter at around thirty metres, but its construction is more elaborate than a simple ring of soil. There is a substantial outer bank, a fosse, which is the ditch cut between the banks, and then the main enclosure bank rising some two and a half metres on its exterior face. That combination of bank, fosse, and outer bank suggests something put together with care and intention.

The dimensions recorded here give a sense of the effort involved. The main bank runs about ten metres wide, and the fosse between it and the outer bank reaches a depth of between one and a half and two and a half metres, with a basal width of three metres, meaning the ditch was dug substantially rather than scratched at the surface. The interior of the enclosure slopes gently southward, and the site sits on enough of a rise to offer good views in all directions, which would have been a practical consideration for anyone living or working within it. Field boundaries now radiate outward from the northwest, east-northeast, and southwest of the monument, a pattern that sometimes reflects the long persistence of earlier land divisions, the rath acting as a fixed point around which later agriculture organised itself.

Dense vegetation now obscures most of the monument, leaving the western side as the only portion readily visible from ground level. Badgers have taken up residence in the banks, their activity a reminder that these earthworks, though ancient, remain dynamic and inhabited in their own way.