What was once a raised circular earthwork, roughly twenty metres across, has since been levelled almost entirely into the surrounding meadow, leaving only the faintest swell in the ground to suggest anything ever stood there.

The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts were the most common form of rural settlement in early Ireland, usually consisting of a circular bank of earth with an outer ditch, enclosing a homestead and its associated outbuildings. By 1935, when the Ordnance Survey recorded this one on its six-inch map, it still registered clearly enough to be marked with hachures, the short lines used by cartographers to indicate a raised earthwork. At that point its circular form was still legible in the landscape. At some stage after that survey it was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, the fate of a great many ringforts across the country during the twentieth century.

What the ground no longer reveals, an aerial photograph has partly recovered. A cropmark, the differential growth of grass or crops over buried features, shows the outline of the enclosing bank as a faint circular trace, most clearly visible along the south-east to north-west arc, with evidence of an external fosse, essentially a defensive ditch, running from the south round to the north-west. Cropmarks of this kind appear most reliably during dry summers, when buried ditches retain moisture slightly longer than the surrounding soil and the vegetation above them stays greener fractionally longer. The buried archaeology at Ballydoyle is otherwise invisible at ground level, present only as a slight rise in the meadow and a fading line on an old map.