The earthen bank that rings the interior is not especially tall, just over a metre above the ground on both its inner and outer faces, but it is continuous enough and coherent enough that you know immediately you are looking at something deliberate. This is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland, essentially a farmstead whose occupants defined their domestic space with a raised earthen bank and, just outside it, a waterlogged ditch called a fosse.

The site at Ballycormick measures almost perfectly circular, 35.5 metres north to south and 35.6 metres east to west, which is typical of the form. The external fosse, 1.8 metres wide and sitting with standing water for much of the year, runs from the north-north-west round to the south. The bank and fosse together are best preserved along the south-east to south arc, while two gaps interrupt the bank on the west-south-west side, at 3.3 metres wide, and on the north-west, at 4.3 metres wide; one of these may represent an original entrance, though the notes compiled by Denis Power, uploaded to the record in August 2011, do not assign that function to either. The enclosure has also suffered some attrition along its north-east to south-east edge, where a field boundary cuts across it. The 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows additional field boundaries butting up against the monument at the north-west and west-south-west, but those have since been removed, leaving the rath a little more legible in the landscape than it was for much of the twentieth century.

The site sits in open pasture on a low hill, so it is visible from the surrounding ground without any particular effort, though access will depend on landowner permission, as is standard for monuments in working farmland. The waterlogged fosse is most apparent in wetter months, when the distinction between the ditch and the bank above it is easier to read. The south-eastern portion of the bank is the part most worth examining closely, as it retains the clearest profile of the original construction. The field boundary truncation on the opposite side is a reminder of how these monuments accumulate small indignities over centuries, losing edges to the practical business of farming while the core of them persists.