The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead built during the early medieval period, typically between roughly 500 and 1000 AD. These structures were once extraordinarily common across the Irish countryside, yet this particular example in Ballyowen has reached a point where even confirming its basic details requires a degree of detective work.

When surveyors recorded the site for the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1924, they noted a roughly circular embanked enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty metres. Later fieldwork, compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011, found the monument largely consumed by vegetation. What could be established through the overgrowth was that the enclosure appears to be defined not by a single bank but by two concentric earthen banks, one inside the other. This is a detail worth pausing on: a bivallate ringfort, as such a double-banked example is sometimes called, was generally associated with higher-status occupants than the more common single-banked variety. The northern side of the outer bank preserves a gap roughly four metres wide, almost certainly the original entrance.

The site sits in ordinary farmland, and there is no formal access or visitor infrastructure of any kind. The overgrowth that defeated earlier surveyors is unlikely to have thinned in the years since. Anyone hoping to locate the banks would do well to visit in late winter or early spring, when vegetation is at its lowest and earthworks buried beneath bramble and scrub have the best chance of revealing themselves. The entrance gap on the northern side of the outer bank is perhaps the most legible feature remaining and may offer the clearest sense of the enclosure's original scale and intention.