The shape is almost circular, measuring roughly 35 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, and it is defined by an earthen bank that still stands to about 0.9 metres in height. A stone field fence, built at some later point by a farmer with little concern for what lay beneath, cuts directly across the southern portion of the site in an east-west line, the kind of pragmatic overlap that happens when land is worked continuously across many centuries.

A rath, as this type of earthwork is sometimes called, is a ringfort: a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet each one represents the defended farmstead of a family or small community, a unit of land and life that was significant enough to warrant the considerable effort of construction. At Ballyjennings, a circular depression roughly 5.7 metres in diameter in the northern part of the enclosure has been identified as a possible hut site, a faint echo of the structure that once stood within the bank. The overall dimensions of the enclosure are modest, consistent with a single-family settlement rather than anything of higher social rank.