What was once clearly legible on the landscape has become, over recent decades, a tangle of dense overgrowth, to the point that a visitor would need to know it was there before they could begin to make sense of what they were looking at.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, generally dating from somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. The form is simple: a roughly circular area of land defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, originally protecting a household, its livestock, and its stores. At Ballyvologe, the enclosing bank still stands to an external height of around one metre, and the outer fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for the bank, drops to a depth of about 1.6 metres. These are modest but legible dimensions. The site was recorded on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an embanked circular enclosure, which gives some indication of how visible it still was in the early twentieth century. The record compiled by Denis Power, uploaded to the national monument database in August 2011, notes that the earthwork could only be partially assessed owing to the vegetation covering it by that point.

The site lies in pasture, which means access depends on whose land it sits on and whether a path presents itself naturally along the field edge. The south-east-facing slope gives the location a degree of openness, so the broader topography is easier to read than the monument itself. Anyone visiting should expect to find the bank more felt underfoot than seen, with the fosse detectable as a distinct drop in the ground just outside it. The overgrowth that obscures the monument also, in a way, preserves it, keeping the earthwork from casual interference. A measured walk around the perimeter, keeping close to the base of the bank, is likely to yield more than trying to view it from any distance.