Stand in the field where it lies and you will see nothing; the site is invisible at ground level, particularly when the ground is under root crops. It takes an aerial photograph to reveal what the soil has quietly preserved, and even then what appears is not a solid structure but a cropmark, the differential growth of plants above buried archaeology betraying the outline of an enclosure that probably last stood well over a thousand years ago.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing. The example at Ballyvaroge is slightly unusual in its geometry. Rather than the fully circular form most commonly associated with the type, aerial photography has revealed a D-shaped or subcircular enclosure, measuring roughly 34 metres northwest to southeast and 30 metres northeast to southwest, positioned at the southern end of a gentle north-south ridge. A straight edge on the southeast side contains what appears to be an entrance gap, suggesting a deliberate flattening of the curve at the point of access rather than the more typical rounded perimeter. The site sits in agricultural land, and the cropmark that betrays its presence would appear most clearly from the air during dry summer conditions, when moisture retained in the deeper soil above buried ditches promotes lusher plant growth in a pattern that mirrors the original layout below.