What was once a raised earthen enclosure, the kind of defended farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families called home, now survives mainly as a waterlogged ring, its former bank levelled by agricultural work and its ditch, or fosse, left as a flooded moat tracing the site's original outline from west to east. The thing that defined the place has become the thing that betrays it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were typically circular enclosures bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period to protect a household and its livestock. This particular example in Ballynamona appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured circular enclosure, and on subsequent editions from 1906 and 1934 it is shown as a slightly raised circular area roughly 28 metres in diameter, with a narrow pond already skirting the site from the south-west to the north-east. By the time of more recent survey work, the raised area measured approximately 34 metres east to west, still faintly elevated above the surrounding ground, still ringed by standing water in the line of the old fosse. Local memory confirms what the maps suggest: the enclosing bank was at some point deliberately knocked into the ditch, flattening the most visible part of the site in the process. The landscape around it is similarly layered; another ringfort lies roughly 120 metres to the west, and a circular enclosure of uncertain character sits about 50 metres to the north-east, suggesting this corner of north Cork was once a reasonably busy patch of early medieval settlement.