This is a rath, a type of ringfort built from an earthen bank to enclose a farmstead, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands of raths survive across the Irish countryside, yet each one carries its own particular state of ruin, and this one at Balrath is notable for how much interpretation its eroded form demands.

When surveyors recorded the monument in 1970, they described a broad oval enclosure roughly 18.5 metres in diameter, surrounded by an earthen bank standing between 2.2 and 2.6 metres high, though by that point it had been almost reduced to a scarp in places. No clear external fosse, the defensive ditch that typically rings such monuments on the outside of the bank, could be identified. The eastern side of the bank was particularly damaged, and it was suggested this may have been where the original entrance once stood. Inside, the ground rises gradually towards the northern quadrant, where faint traces of a house site remain. By 1981, surveyors noted a berm, a flat ledge of ground between the base of the bank and where a fosse would have been, running about three metres wide, along with a gap in the bank to the north-east that may represent a second or alternative entrance. The 1913 Ordnance Survey twenty-five inch map had already recorded the earthwork in its oval form, offering a useful fixed point against which later changes to the monument could be measured.