The site is known locally as Lios na gréine, meaning roughly "fort of the sun", or simply "the Lios", a name that quietly preserves a memory of the place even as the physical remains have diminished around it.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period in Ireland as a farmstead or place of habitation. This example in Ballynew is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 41 metres across on its east-west axis and around 36 metres north to south. What survives consists of a scarp, an intervening fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank, but these elements remain only along the eastern, southern, and western arcs. The northern section, where the enclosure would have completed its circuit, has been lost to the construction of the house that now occupies that ground. The result is a monument that is, by any measure, poorly preserved, yet the surviving earthworks are legible enough to suggest the original scale and form of the enclosure. The south-facing slope on which it sits, looking out over Ballynakill Lough, would have offered both prospect and drainage, practical considerations that likely influenced its original siting as much as any other factor.