Measuring roughly 112 metres north to south and 100 metres east to west, it is a substantial structure, broadly comparable in scale to some of the larger ringforts found across the west of Ireland. A ringfort, in general terms, is an enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, defined by one or more banks or walls, though enclosures of this kind can sometimes belong to earlier or later phases of activity. The defining drystone wall here is best preserved along the northern to north-eastern arc, while elsewhere it has been absorbed into later field boundaries or has disappeared entirely beneath the grass.

Two older accounts give the site much of what character it has on paper. Cody, writing in 1989, recorded a wide entrance gap of 9.5 metres on the western side, where the wall is noted to kink inwards, a feature that sometimes indicates a formalised threshold or passage. That area is now heavily overgrown. Knox, writing considerably earlier in 1918, recorded something more unsettling: local farmers working the interior had turned up numerous human bones. Whether these represent a burial ground, the aftermath of conflict, or something else entirely remains an open question. The interior has since been further complicated by modern field walls, one of which runs directly over what appears to have been an original internal division in the eastern half of the monument. Approximately 20 metres to the south lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement, suggesting that this corner of Ballygarraun was once a place of some organised activity, even if the precise nature of that activity has long since slipped from the record.