No earthwork rises from the ground, no ditch cuts across the turf. The ringfort that almost certainly stood here has left no visible surface trace, absorbed over the centuries first by a plantation of trees and then by their removal.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or place of refuge. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this one as a circular enclosure roughly 40 metres in diameter. By the time the 1933 edition was drawn, the same spot appeared as a large, roughly subrectangular tree plantation measuring around 80 metres east to west and 77 metres north to south, considerably larger than the original enclosure. The scholar Cody, writing in 1989, concluded that the plantation had been laid out over what was already a ringfort, with the trees eventually obscuring and then erasing whatever earthwork had survived. The trees inside have since been cleared, but the bank that framed the plantation remains, with trees still rooted along it, tracing a rough outline of something much older underneath. The site does not stand alone; another rath lies approximately 50 metres to the south-west, and a further enclosure sits around 70 metres to the south-east, suggesting this corner of Ballygarraun was once a more organised and inhabited landscape than the quiet pasture now implies.