To the north of the bank, the ground has been levelled almost completely, leaving only a small fragment of the original enclosing earthwork, roughly 12 metres long and 4 metres wide, as evidence that anything once stood here. To the south, the picture changes considerably. A well-preserved semicircular bank and its accompanying fosse, the exterior ditch that would originally have defined and defended the perimeter, remain largely intact. The fosse runs to about 2 metres in width and 0.6 metres in depth, and the enclosing bank rises to 0.7 metres on its outer face.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, broadly spanning the period from around the fifth to the twelfth century. They served as domestic compounds, protecting a family, their livestock, and their grain stores within a banked and ditched perimeter. The Ballyloughran example, with an internal diameter of 33 metres east to west, sits at the upper left corner of a large pastoral field, which places it in the landscape in a way that would have been typical: elevated slightly, with a clear view over working agricultural ground. The site was documented as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, compiled by C. Toal and published in 1995, which recorded a large number of such monuments across the region.

What makes the Ballyloughran rath quietly interesting is not grandeur but division. The contrast between the near-total erasure on the northern side and the relatively clear earthworks surviving to the south gives the site an almost cross-sectional quality, as though the later agricultural boundary has inadvertently preserved a before-and-after within a single field corner.