One section of its outer ditch has been quietly repurposed as a watering hole for cattle, which is a fate that would have baffled the people who originally dug it. That fosse, the trench dug between the two concentric banks that define this site, was once part of a defensive or status-marking enclosure; today it serves livestock, and the distinction between ancient monument and working farmland has all but dissolved.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument found across the country. Typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, raths were enclosed farmsteads, their earthen banks and ditches marking out a household's territory as much as providing any serious fortification. The Ballynacurragh example measures 43.3 metres in diameter and retains two banks with a fosse between them, which places it in the bivallate category, a slightly more elaborate form that may reflect the relative wealth or standing of its original occupants. The inner bank is best preserved along its eastern and southern arc, where stone-facing is still intermittently visible. Towards the west and north-east, the bank becomes barely perceptible, and at one point disappears entirely. A gap at the north-east may mark an original entrance. A grassed-over bank running south-east for 33.5 metres abuts the monument at its south-south-west; its relationship to the rath is uncertain, though it may have served as a boundary or approach feature associated with the enclosure. McCaffrey noted the site in 1952, cataloguing it among the region's earthwork monuments.

About 40 metres to the east stands a separate feature entirely: a standing stone, a single upright that predates the rath by potentially thousands of years. Whether the two monuments were ever understood as related by the people who built or used them is unknown, but their proximity is the kind of quiet accident of survival that makes a scruffy, half-legible field monument worth a second look.