It commands clear views in every direction, which was almost certainly the point. This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied primarily during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands once existed across Ireland, making them among the most common field monuments in the country, yet each one has its own particular character, and this example at Ballintue is more elaborate than most.

The enclosure measures approximately 38 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, and unusually it is defended not by a single bank and ditch but by two concentric earth and stone banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. A ringfort with this kind of double enclosure is sometimes called a bivallate rath, and the additional circuit of defence generally suggests a site of some local importance, perhaps the farmstead of a prosperous family or minor chieftain. The inner bank survives best on its south-eastern arc; elsewhere it has been worn nearly flat. The outer bank has fared somewhat better, though along its northern and south-western stretches it has been absorbed into a field boundary, with traces of stone facing still visible along its edge. The original entrance is still legible: a gap just under three metres wide in the inner bank at the east, marked on its northern side by a large stone set upright, leading across a low causeway to a corresponding break in the outer bank, now occupied by a modern farm gateway. Inside the enclosure the ground rises gently towards the centre, where a shallow circular depression may mark the footprint of a former house. A separate mystery sits in the north-western quadrant: a large stone, two metres long and half a metre tall, also set on edge, whose purpose remains unclear. A second ringfort lies just 350 metres to the south-east, hinting that this corner of Westmeath was once a settled and well-organised landscape.