The earthwork itself is modest in scale, roughly thirty-one metres across, its sod-covered stone bank surviving best at the north and north-east, where it still stands about half a metre above the interior. Elsewhere the bank has been worn down to a simple scarp, though a slight stony lip along the inside edge betrays its original construction. A level interior and good views outward from the low rise it occupies are characteristic of the form.

Raths, the most common type of ringfort in Ireland, were typically farmstead enclosures built during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The bank and any associated ditch would have defined a domestic space, sheltering a household and its livestock. This particular example has been absorbed into the working landscape in ways that layer its history. A field wall runs east to west through the southern half of the interior, bisecting the enclosure, and a second wall branches south through the south-east quadrant, suggesting the rath has served as a convenient boundary marker for generations of farmers. Cultivation ridges, the low parallel earthworks left by spade tillage, are still faintly visible across the northern half of the interior, evidence that the enclosed ground was turned over for crops at some point after the ringfort ceased to function as a settlement. Most striking, though, is the local tradition that the site was used as a children's burial ground. Such associations are found at a number of ringforts and other pre-Christian or liminal sites across Ireland, where unconsecrated ground was sometimes chosen for the burial of unbaptised infants, known in Irish as cillíní. The tradition at Ballyglass places the rath within that quiet, sorrowful geography.