Its enclosing bank, barely half a metre high, is faced on the outside with stone, a construction choice that sets it apart from the purely earthen raths that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands. That stone facing suggests someone took deliberate care with the outward appearance of the boundary, or perhaps needed the extra structural integrity that a stone revetment provides.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the dominant form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, the circular bank and any accompanying ditch forming a boundary that kept livestock in and wolves or raiders out. The one at Ballygirriha is modest in scale, its interior measuring roughly 26.8 metres across, which places it at the smaller end of the spectrum. Most ringforts of this size would have sheltered a single family and their animals. The earthen bank survives to a height of only half a metre today, considerably reduced from whatever it once stood, but enough to trace the full circle of the original enclosure.

One quiet piece of evidence for the site's local significance survives in the landscape itself. The roadway running to the north of the ringfort bends to respect the boundary of the monument, a telling sign that even as the surrounding land was parcelled up and worked over across the centuries, people continued to route their paths around it rather than through it.