That depression alone gives the site a particular character. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen, were the standard farmstead enclosures of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Most contained a house, perhaps animal shelters, and occasionally a souterrain, an underground passage used for storage or refuge. This one sits atop a low rise in gently undulating pasture at Ballymackeamore, and whatever once occupied that interior hollow has left no above-ground explanation.

The enclosure was surveyed and recorded by Denis Power, with the record uploaded in August 2011. The rath measures roughly 37.5 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, placing it within the typical size range for a single-farmstead ringfort. Its boundary is formed partly by an earthen bank and partly by a scarped, or cut-away, edge in the ground, the combination suggesting the terrain itself was shaped carefully to reinforce the enclosure. On the western side, an outer bank runs from west to south-east, standing about 0.7 metres above the exterior ground level, with the distance between the tops of the two banks measuring 2.8 metres. A gap of around 1.8 metres in the western bank most likely marks the original entrance. A field boundary has been built up against the south-west of the enclosure at some point, a common fate for ringforts that survive in agricultural land, where later generations of farmers worked around them rather than through them.

The site sits in pasture and is not formally managed for visitors, so access would depend on the landowner's permission. Because the earthworks are relatively low, with the outer bank reaching only about a metre above the external ground on its highest side, the whole thing reads more clearly from a slight distance than from within. The interior is rough grazing ground, so the circular depression in the south-west quadrant is the feature most worth looking for underfoot. A recently built farm building sits immediately outside the enclosure to the south-east, which orients the approach usefully but also means the site is now framed by working agricultural infrastructure on at least one side.