The site at Ballygarrane is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across the Irish landscape, typically a circular earthen enclosure built to protect a family, their livestock, and their home. This one occupies a north-to-south ridge in pasture, a position that would have given its original occupants a useful vantage over the surrounding land. Today, the bank and its outer ditch have been levelled, and the area has been used as a dumping ground, leaving an uneven surface of rough vegetation where a functioning settlement once stood.

The site's outline is traceable, even if it has not survived well above ground. Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842 and 1935 both record it as a hachured circular enclosure, and the 1935 edition clearly shows the external fosse, the defensive ditch that ran from the east around to the north-north-west. What remains on the ground today is a slightly raised, roughly circular area measuring approximately 48 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west. The combination of cartographic evidence and physical trace is typical of how many levelled ringforts across Ireland are identified and recorded, the map preserving a shape the ground can no longer clearly express.