The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the standard form of enclosed rural settlement used across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These were not military fortifications in any grand sense, but rather circular earthen enclosures, typically surrounding a family's home, outbuildings, and livestock pens. At Ballydaly, the enclosure measured approximately twenty metres in diameter, making it a relatively modest example of the type.

The site sits on level ground, with the land dropping away to the west and north, a positioning that would have offered both drainage advantages and a degree of natural outlook. An arc of the original earthen bank survives to the north-west, rising to a maximum height of around two metres in places, which is a reasonable preservation for a structure of its age given the general pressures of agricultural use over the centuries. The enclosure was recorded as a circular feature on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1902, marked with the hachuring that cartographers of that era used to indicate earthworks and raised ground. By that point, and almost certainly long before, the surviving bank had already been absorbed into the local field fence system, a fate common to ringforts across Ireland as working farms adapted old boundaries to new purposes.

The bank itself is the main thing to look for on the ground. The full circle is no longer intact, but what remains gives a clear enough sense of the original scale and the care with which such enclosures were constructed, built up from excavated material rather than imported stone, and shaped to enclose a space that once held the daily life of an early Irish farming household.