The site at Ballylane survives today only as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that becomes legible from the air when buried features, such as a filled-in ditch, cause the vegetation above them to ripen or dry at a different rate from the surrounding field. What appears below is the silhouette of a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

The enclosure is oval, measuring approximately thirty metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around twenty-five metres across from north-west to south-east. A single fosse, that is, a defensive or boundary ditch, defines the outline along its north-east, southern, and western arcs, and it is this feature that registers so clearly on aerial photographs. The site is modest in scale and unremarkable by the standards of Irish ringforts, of which tens of thousands are known across the country, but its survival as a cropmark rather than a visible earthwork is itself quietly telling. It suggests that whatever once stood or was enclosed here has been absorbed entirely into the agricultural landscape, leaving the ditch as the sole legible remnant.

Because the site survives only as a cropmark visible from the air, there is little for a visitor on the ground to observe directly. The field above it would look, in most seasons, indistinguishable from any other on the slope.