The enclosure is a rath, a type of ringfort built from an earthen bank and ditch that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period. This one is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 33 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south, and what defines its outline now is a scarp, a sloped edge or drop in the ground, ranging in height from under a metre to nearly three metres at various points.

The site is poorly preserved. In several places the interior has been quarried out, removing material that would otherwise have helped to read the original shape and depth of the enclosure. Yet despite this disturbance, the eastern sector of the interior holds something that gives the place a particular weight: a cillín, or children's burial ground. These informal burial sites, found across Ireland often within or beside older earthworks, were historically used for unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. The association between ringforts and cillíní is not unusual; the liminal status of ancient enclosures, already set apart from ordinary agricultural land and carrying an air of the uncanny in folk tradition, made them a recurrent choice for such burials, often well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The result at Ben Beg is a site where early medieval settlement, post-medieval quarrying, and post-Reformation burial custom have all left their mark on the same modest patch of ground, each obscuring or overlapping the other in ways that are still visible if you know what to look for.