The earthworks are substantial enough: a roughly circular enclosure, forty-five metres across in both directions, bounded by an earthen bank that still rises over two metres above the surrounding ground on its outer face. A fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such a bank, survives to a depth of over a metre, and a causewayed entrance, a deliberate gap left in the ditch to allow passage, opens to the south-south-east at nearly four metres wide. For all its solidity, the site is smothered by trees, which give it a muffled, enclosed quality quite different from the open hillside ringforts more familiar from the Irish landscape.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically housing a single farming family and their livestock. They were built in their thousands between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and north Cork has a dense concentration of them. What makes this particular example at Ballygiblin worth a second look is the ancillary feature on its southern side. A rectangular enclosure, bounded by a low bank, adjoins the main monument, and within its northern end, just outside the fosse, sits a slightly raised platform. At the centre of that platform is a circular depression roughly three metres across and half a metre deep, with noticeably vertical sides. The function of such a feature is not recorded here with certainty, but the geometry is precise enough to suggest it was deliberately constructed rather than naturally formed. A separate low bank running roughly north-north-west to east-south-east beyond the fosse appears to be the remnant of an old field boundary, hinting at the agricultural landscape that once surrounded the enclosure.

A roadway skirts the eastern edge of the site, which at least places it within reach, though the conifer planting means that reading the earthworks on the ground requires patience. The bank and fosse are most legible from the interior, and the rectangular southern enclosure, easy to overlook as a secondary feature, is arguably the most intriguing element of the whole complex.