What was once a complete circular enclosure has contracted, over the centuries, into a partial arc, absorbed so gradually into the surrounding field boundaries that it now reads less as a monument than as an irregularity in the landscape.

A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Baile Mhic Íre example was still legible as a full circle on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, drawn there as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around twenty-eight metres. By the time the 1903 and 1940 surveys were carried out, only an arc to the north survived within the field fence system, the rest having been swallowed into the working agricultural landscape. What persists on the ground today is a circular area measuring roughly twenty-four metres north to south, bounded by an earthen bank rising to about 1.8 metres on its western and northern sides, and a lower scarp of around one metre running from the south-east back round to the west-northwest. The bank is overgrown with hawthorn in exactly the way the field boundaries around it are, which helps explain why it can pass unnoticed even to someone walking close by.