A circular earthwork roughly 27 metres across sits in the grass at Ballykenny, so thoroughly reduced by time and agriculture that its bank rises only about ten centimetres on the interior side and 65 centimetres on the exterior. The surrounding fosse, a shallow ditch that would once have defined the outer edge of the enclosure, survives to a depth of around 15 centimetres and a width of one metre. These are modest measurements by any standard, and yet the shape persists, legible in the land if you know what to look for.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval monument in Ireland. Ringforts were typically circular enclosures defined by one or more banks and ditches, used as farmsteads and places of settlement from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, though many have been lost entirely to ploughing and land improvement over the centuries. The Ballykenny example was recorded as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1924, which means it was still sufficiently visible at that point to be worth mapping. Since then it has been levelled considerably, though it has not disappeared. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national monuments database in August 2011.

Because this site sits in working farmland, access would depend entirely on the goodwill of the landowner, and there is no formal provision for visitors. The site carries no signage and no infrastructure. What a careful observer would find is a subtly raised circular outline in grass, with the slight depression of the fosse tracing the perimeter. Low-angle light, particularly on an overcast day or in the slanted light of morning or late afternoon, tends to make earthworks of this kind considerably more readable in the landscape, throwing faint shadows across features that are otherwise easy to miss entirely. The interior is level and grassed over, giving no indication of what, if anything, lies beneath the surface.