Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lioses, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches encircling a living and working area. Here, the enclosure measures roughly 25 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, its outline now reduced to a low rise no more than 0.3 metres at its highest, with an external depression still faintly legible along the northern arc. The interior tilts sharply southward down the slope it occupies, facing south-west.

The site has not survived intact. It was partially levelled at some point, and its condition fits a pattern noted by the local historian Power in 1940, who recorded that on the farms then belonging to a family named Smith there had once been two lioses, but that both had been destroyed. Whether this site is one of those two, or a separate survival, the observation underlines how comprehensively these earthworks were cleared from the Cork landscape as agricultural improvement took hold across successive generations. What persists at Ballyroe does so almost incidentally, its form legible mainly where the gorse has taken root along the buried line of the bank.