No walls, no tower, no signage. Just a low circular bank rising no more than 0.7 metres at its highest point, enclosing a roughly oval space about 33 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west. What gives it away, if you know what to look for, is the interior: the inner face of the bank slopes gently downward toward the centre, creating a shallow, saucer-shaped depression that is characteristic of a certain class of early medieval enclosure.

This is a rath, the most common type of ringfort found across Ireland. Raths were typically enclosed farmsteads built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and many thousands of them survive in various states of preservation across the country. They were constructed from the earth dug to create an encircling ditch, piled inward to form a bank, and would originally have sheltered a family, their livestock, and perhaps a handful of outbuildings. The Ballynora example retains a berm, a flat shelf of ground between the outer face of the bank and what would have been the ditch, and a original entrance gap on the north-north-east side, just under 2.5 metres wide. A roadway running north-west to south-east has since clipped the north-east arc of the enclosure, truncating part of the circuit. How much that road has disturbed the original ground is difficult to say from the surface alone.

The site looks north across the Lee valley, a view that would have made practical sense to whoever chose to build here, offering a clear sightline over the surrounding landscape. The enclosure is set in working farmland, which accounts for both its relatively low profile and its survival; pasture tends to preserve earthworks better than arable ground.