Heavily overgrown and low to the land, it is the kind of monument that rewards patience and a good eye, its circular outline still just legible beneath the vegetation if you know what you are looking for.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are sometimes called, was typically a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, its bank and ditch marking out a defended homestead for a farming family of some local standing. This example at Ballaghadigue is classed as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the two or three rings that indicate higher status. That bank is modest in scale, roughly 2.6 metres wide and rising only between 15 and 35 centimetres above the interior ground level, though it sits about 60 centimetres above the outer fosse, the shallow ditch that runs around the exterior. The fosse itself is 2.5 metres wide and drops around 40 centimetres below the level of the surrounding land. The whole enclosure has an internal diameter of 44 metres, placing it at a reasonable size for a single-ring rath. It lies about 11 metres south-west of a small stream, in land that drains poorly, which goes some way towards explaining both the vegetation cover and the generally soft, subdued condition of the earthworks. The site was recorded and described in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by Caimin Toal, and it carries a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts.