No earthwork survives above ground; what reveals it is a cropmark, the faint difference in colour and growth that ripening grain or grass displays over buried ditches and walls. In this case, the cropmark traces the fosse, or outer ditch, of a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, and it was only spotted from the air in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989.

What makes the Ballymee site quietly compelling is not any single feature but the density of remains clustered around it. Within a radius of two hundred metres, at least three other enclosures have been recorded, along with a ringfort approximately a hundred metres to the south. Ringforts, which are enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, are common across Ireland, but finding several enclosures of this kind in such close proximity suggests this corner of north Cork was more intensively settled or organised than the bare fields above it now imply. A field system has also been recorded in the vicinity, adding to the impression of a landscape that was once carefully divided and worked. Whether the circular enclosure at Ballymee was a settlement, a stock enclosure, or something else is not known; its purpose, like its physical form, remains buried.