A rath typically consisted of one or more earthen banks and ditches enclosing a circular living area, serving as a farmstead for a family of some local standing. This one at Ballintava is modest and worn, measuring roughly 29.5 metres from east to west, and what survives is more of an impression in the land than a legible structure.

The monument is defined by a degraded scarp, with an intervening fosse (a ditch running between the inner and outer elements of the enclosure) and an outer bank that is best preserved at the south-west. Two small quarries lie at the north and south of the site, and a field boundary cuts across the monument at the north-north-east, the kind of incremental damage that accumulates over centuries of agricultural use. The site was recorded by Neary in 1914, catalogued as number 37 in a list of local antiquities, and later included in the published Archaeological Inventory of North Galway. That combination of early twentieth-century field observation and later systematic survey is fairly typical for sites of this kind across the west of Ireland, many of which were noticed and noted long before any formal protection existed.

What makes Ballintava quietly interesting is less what survives than what the fragments suggest. The south-western arc of the outer bank, still the most legible part of the earthwork, gives a sense of the original circuit. The quarrying and the intruding field wall are reminders that this landscape has been worked continuously, and that the rath was simply absorbed into that ongoing use rather than preserved apart from it.