The rath at Ballinteane sits on a slight hillock amid undulating grassland, its circular enclosure measuring roughly 31.5 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south. A bank of earth and stone, around 4.6 metres wide and less than a metre tall on its outer face, rings the interior. It is a modest profile for something that may be over a thousand years old, and easy to walk past without registering what it is.

Raths, sometimes called ringforts, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, in use roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were built and lived in by farming families rather than warriors or kings, their banks serving as much to keep livestock in as to keep trouble out. At Ballinteane, a gap roughly two metres wide in the northern section of the bank is thought to mark the original entrance, the point where a family and their animals would have passed in and out of the enclosure daily. Beneath the enclosed ground there may also be a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built of stone, which in Irish ringforts typically served for storage, shelter, or concealment. The possible souterrain here has its own separate record, suggesting enough survives below ground to merit closer attention.