From the outside, it reads as a gentle swell in the ground, the kind of irregularity you might attribute to drainage or old field management. Look more carefully, and the logic of an early medieval farmstead begins to resolve itself: a roughly circular enclosure, a surrounding ditch, and a single deliberate gap where a causeway once carried people in and out. Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when built from earth, were the standard unit of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, domestic compounds rather than military fortifications, where a farming family would have kept livestock and built their home within a raised bank.

The Ballyneety example measures approximately 26.8 metres north to south and 29.9 metres east to west, placing it in the mid-range for sites of this type. The enclosing bank survives to an internal height of 0.65 metres and an external height of 2 metres, and is accompanied by an external fosse, the term for the ditch dug to throw up the bank material, which runs to a depth of around one metre and a width of just over three metres. The fosse is at its widest and most distinctly flat-bottomed along the northern arc, suggesting that stretch saw the most deliberate shaping. Cattle have worn down the southern section of the bank considerably over time. A field boundary runs along the outer edge of the fosse from the south-southwest to the northeast, meaning the enclosure now occupies the northeast corner of its field. The survey was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The one clearly legible original feature is the entrance, located at the east-southeast, where the bank dips for roughly 2.15 metres and is matched by a causeway across the fosse. That alignment and the shallow south-facing interior slope, now thick with nettles, give a sense of how the site was oriented for light and drainage. Access depends on private land, so seeking permission before visiting is the practical first step. The earthworks are most readable in low winter light, when the angle of the sun throws the bank and fosse into relief and the nettles have died back enough to let the interior ground surface show through.