It is an odd detail, the kind of thing that makes a routine field monument suddenly feel inhabited by time in a different way. The site itself is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland, essentially a circular area of raised ground enclosed by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, or fosse. These were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, home to a single family and their livestock, and tens of thousands of them survive in varying states of preservation.

The Ballygeel example sits in level pasture and measures roughly thirty metres in diameter, enclosed by an earthen bank that stands about 1.05 metres above the interior and 1.4 metres above the outer ground surface. The fosse beyond it, though relatively shallow at 0.35 metres deep and 2.1 metres wide, has retained enough moisture at its northern end to form a small oval pond measuring approximately four metres north to south and eight metres east to west. What is also visible from the record compiled by Denis Power is how thoroughly the surrounding landscape of later field division has overwritten the monument. A field boundary runs directly across the bank from north-east to south-west, and further boundaries abut it at four additional points around the perimeter, suggesting that generations of farmers simply incorporated the ancient earthwork into their own systems of enclosure without much ceremony.

The interior is largely level but covered by dense overgrowth except for a small area along the northern edge. Access is as a working agricultural landscape, so any visit should be approached with awareness of land ownership and seasonal grazing. The aerial photograph taken in October 2002 and held by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland gives a clearer sense of the overall form than a ground-level visit might, since the vegetation obscures much of the detail. If you do go in person, the pond in the fosse is probably the most immediately legible feature, and the overlapping field boundaries that cut across the bank reward a slow and attentive look at how modern land use and ancient structure have quietly negotiated their way around each other.