This disproportion between interior and exterior height is part of what makes a rath, as this type of ringfort is known, so legible even after more than a thousand years. The bank is built up outward rather than inward, meaning the people who constructed it were as concerned with how imposing it looked from outside as with what it enclosed.

The site at Ballyguileataggle sits on a north-east-facing slope and measures roughly 21.6 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, making it a fairly typical example of the smaller ringfort class. A ringfort, or rath, is a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period in Ireland primarily as a farmstead or high-status domestic settlement. Here, the outer ditch, known as a fosse, is nearly a metre deep and over two and a half metres wide, and it survives intact enough to be measured. The enclosing bank and fosse are now heavily overgrown with bushes and scrub, which is common for sites that have been left undisturbed in agricultural land. An original entrance, about 2.4 metres wide with a causeway crossing the fosse, survives at the south-south-east. Inside the NW quadrant, there is a shallow trench roughly six metres long with a right-angled extension at each end, forming a loose U-shape; its function is not specified in the survey record compiled by Denis Power, though features of this kind can sometimes indicate later agricultural use or earlier structural remains. The site was recorded by aerial photograph in October 2002.

The site sits in working pasture, so access would depend on landowner permission. The aerial photographs referenced in the survey record, taken in October 2002, give the clearest sense of the overall shape of the enclosure and the entrance causeway, which may be harder to read at ground level given the scrub growth along the bank. Visitors approaching on foot should look for the pronounced exterior drop of the bank, which at over four metres is considerably more visible from the field outside than from within the enclosed interior, where the ground levels out and the scale of the earthwork becomes less obvious.