That absence is quietly unsettling. Every ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland mainly during the early medieval period, would have had a gap in its bank through which people, animals, and carts could pass. Here, no such gap has been identified, leaving the question of how occupants came and went essentially unanswered.

The site itself is modest in scale but reasonably well preserved along its northern arc. The earthen bank there still rises to around two metres on its outer face and stretches some seven metres in width, figures that suggest a structure originally built with some care and effort. Towards the south and west, though, the bank has eroded to little more than a low scarp half a metre high, and the external fosse, the shallow defensive ditch that would once have encircled the enclosure, survives only as a faint trace on the eastern side. The overall diameter runs to roughly thirty-five metres north to south and thirty-three metres east to west, placing it within the typical range for a single-banked rath, the earthen variety of ringfort. The site sits towards the bottom of the south-west-facing foothills of Slievecoiltia, a position that would have offered its early medieval occupants reasonable shelter and, presumably, workable agricultural land nearby.

The uneven survival of the bank, most robust in the north-west to north-east quadrant and much reduced elsewhere, is typical of sites that have been subject to centuries of low-level agricultural disturbance. What makes Ballyfarnoge worth pausing over is precisely that missing entrance. It may be that erosion has simply obscured it, or that it lay in the most degraded southern portion of the bank. Either way, the gap in the record mirrors the gap in the earthwork itself.