Mapped as a circular enclosure in 1841-42, by the 1914-15 edition it had become oval, a shift that speaks less to any dramatic event than to the slow, patient pressure of agricultural land use on ancient structures across the Irish countryside.

The site is a univallate rath, meaning a ringfort defined by a single enclosing bank rather than the multiple concentric ramparts found at more elaborate examples. Ringforts of this kind were the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. At Ballintogher, the enclosing bank is low but broad, averaging 5.6 metres wide at its base and rising only 0.8 metres above the surrounding ground, with a slightly greater drop of around a metre on the interior side. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is a feature set into the southeast sector of the bank on its outer face: a semi-circular recess, apparently stone-lined, measuring 3.6 metres north to south internally, around half a metre deep, and with an opening 1.2 metres wide. Its in-curve faces outward, away from the enclosed interior. The function of such a feature is not entirely clear, though recesses and annexes on the exterior of rath banks have been interpreted elsewhere as animal pens or small storage areas. A bohareen, the Irish term for a narrow rural lane, runs immediately to the north of the site, suggesting the rath sits within a landscape that has retained traces of older field patterns and routeways.