The monument at Ballysakeery is classified as a possible ring barrow, a type of Bronze Age funerary monument typically consisting of a central mound enclosed by a circular bank and ditch, though here both features have been so thoroughly softened by time that the boundary between archaeology and natural landform is genuinely uncertain. The circular mound measures roughly 14 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south, rising no more than about half a metre at its eastern and western edges, and just over a metre on its northern and southern sides. That modest height difference is partly explained by the ridge itself: the natural fall of the land to north and south lends the mound an apparent prominence it might not otherwise have.

Surrounding the mound, at a gap of just over two metres, there is a slight raised undulation that may once have been a bank, with a shallow depression between the two that could represent a fosse, the encircling ditch that characterises ring barrows of this type. The outer bank can be traced from the south-east around to the north-north-east, but it fades and disappears toward the north-east and east, leaving the monument's full outline a matter of interpretation rather than certainty. The ridge on which it sits runs east to west through sharply undulating terrain of drumlin-like hillocks, with a small rush-grown boggy basin at the base of the steep southern slope. What the monument's builders chose, whether deliberately or not, was a position of remarkable geographical reach: Killala Bay and Bartagh Island lie to the north, the Moy estuary opens out to the north-east, the Ox Mountains sit on the eastern horizon, and Nephin Mountain rises prominently to the south-south-west, with the Nephin Beg Range extending across the far south-western skyline.