The ground rises in a low, grass-covered circle roughly 39 metres across, with a shallow depression running around part of its outer edge. To a casual eye it might read as a natural undulation, a trick of the terrain. But the shape is too deliberate, the geometry too consistent, for that.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish countryside. Ringforts were enclosed farmsteads, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, in which a family and their livestock lived within a bank and ditch that offered both security and social status. The one at Ballyfadeen Beg was substantial enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and 1904, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure with a diameter of around 35 metres. By the time the 1937 edition was produced, the northeast side of the enclosure was shown as open, suggesting gradual deterioration over those intervening decades. What survives today is a segment of earthen bank, standing to about 1.7 metres in height, that has been absorbed into the modern field fence system along its northwest to north arc. That bank is stone-faced on its outer side, a detail that lifts it slightly above the purely earthen construction typical of many raths and hints at the investment of effort the original builders were prepared to make. The interior is level ground, as it would have been when the enclosure was in active use.