The site at Ballymadder sits on a gentle southward slope that runs down to low sea-cliffs and a beach, and what remains of the enclosure is only detectable as a cropmark, the faint trace left in vegetation when buried features alter how plants grow above them. Half of the original circuit has already been claimed by coastal erosion, and what survives is visible mainly from the air rather than on foot.

A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, would originally have been defined here by a raised bank and an accompanying fosse, or ditch, dug to create it. At Ballymadder, that fosse is the feature still faintly legible in aerial photographs, enclosing a space of roughly thirty metres in diameter. What makes the location notable beyond its own fragile survival is its setting within a cluster of similar sites: a second rath lies approximately 120 metres to the north-west, and a third around 280 metres to the west. Three ringforts within a few hundred metres of one another suggests this stretch of coastline was once a reasonably settled and organised early medieval landscape, even if the sea has since been steadily editing the evidence.