The western half of its interior serves as a dump for farmyard manure, while the eastern half has gone the other way entirely, becoming waterlogged and colonised by rushes. It is a remarkably undignified fate for a structure that was once, in all likelihood, the enclosed homestead of an early medieval farming family.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when constructed from earth rather than stone, were the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. They consisted of a circular area enclosed by one or more raised earthen banks, with a corresponding external ditch, called a fosse, dug to provide the material for the bank and to add a defensive or at least territorial boundary. The example at Ballyvorisheen measures approximately 44 metres across from east to west. Its enclosing bank survives to an internal height of around 1.25 metres and an external height of 1.3 metres, though it is now heavily overgrown. The fosse is traceable to the north and south-south-west, where a possible counterscarp bank, a secondary low ridge on the outer edge of the ditch, also survives to a height of 0.6 metres. A gap of roughly 4.6 metres in the bank to the north-west likely marks the original entrance. Rubble has been tipped onto the southern stretch of the bank, adding to the general sense that the site has been absorbed into the working landscape around it without much ceremony.