This is one of those sites where the interest lies not in grandeur but in layering, in the quiet evidence of something more considered than a simple enclosure.

A rath is a type of ringfort, the circular enclosed settlement that was the dominant form of rural habitation in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. At Ballinvira, the enclosing bank is roughly circular, measuring about 28 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west. It is built from earth and stone, with an internal height of around 0.45 metres and an external height of 0.75 metres, and it is accompanied by an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running from the west-southwest around to the north-northwest, roughly 0.9 metres deep and a metre wide. Large boulders are incorporated into the bank along the northern and eastern arc. The bank survives best on the western and north-western sides, becoming progressively harder to read as it curves around to the south-east and south-west. A dry-stone field wall, standing about 0.9 metres high, has been built along the outer edge of the fosse on the south-western to north-northwestern section, presumably at some later agricultural date. The most intriguing detail, recorded by Denis Power when the site was surveyed, is a second, lower earth-and-stone bank, only 0.2 metres high, traceable inside the main enclosure. It curves gently from the north-northwest to the north-east, running about seven metres inside the main bank before fading out, then reappearing closer, about three metres from the inner bank face, along the eastern to south-eastern arc.

The site sits on a gentle north-east-facing slope in what is now pastureland, and the level interior is covered by mature trees and scattered with loose stones. A wide gap of nearly seven metres in the northern section of the bank may be an original entrance or a later breach. The inner bank, low and fragmentary as it is, rewards a slow circuit of the interior; it is easy to miss if you are moving quickly or if the light is flat. The tree cover can make it difficult to get a clear sense of the overall shape from within, so it helps to walk the outer bank first to establish the circuit before moving inward.