It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey maps, yet the people who live around it have their own name for it: a raheen, which is the Irish diminutive for a small fort and a word that tends to linger in local speech long after the earthwork itself has been half-forgotten by the wider record. That gap between local knowledge and formal documentation is itself a small historical curiosity, since ringforts, the circular enclosed homesteads of early medieval Ireland, are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country and are usually well-mapped.

What survives at Ballinakill is a subcircular, grass-covered enclosure measuring roughly 49 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, sitting on a gentle south-facing slope. Its edges are defined partly by a field bank running from the south-east around to the west, accompanied by an external fosse, which is essentially a ditch dug to reinforce the enclosure boundary, and elsewhere by a low scarp and traces of a further fosse. The site also retains a fragment of an annexe, an outer enclosure that extended the defended or managed space beyond the main fort, surviving along the eastern to south-western arc and measuring about 27 metres north to south. A wide entrance ramp, some 12 metres across, cuts through the annexe perimeter at the south. A narrower ramp at the south-east leads down towards a pond, though this feature may be a later addition rather than original to the early medieval construction.