Push past the overgrowth, however, and the ground begins to speak in the language of early medieval Ireland: a curving bank, a ditch, a counterscarp, all arranged in a circle that once defined somebody's home, farmstead, or place of refuge.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common monument type surviving in the Irish landscape. Ringforts were typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household, their banks and ditches serving as much to define social status and contain livestock as to provide serious defence. The Ballynash example was originally a circular enclosure approximately thirty metres in diameter, defined by an earth-and-stone bank. That bank survives along its north-west to south-east arc, rising about 1.3 metres on its outer face, though only 0.35 metres on the interior, suggesting considerable silting and slippage over the centuries. Beyond the main bank runs an external fosse, a defensive ditch roughly three metres wide and 0.6 metres deep, with a low counterscarp bank on its far edge. Two breaks in the inner bank, each about two metres wide, sit at the south-east and north, and likely mark the original entrance points. The western and southern portions of the circuit have been lost to field boundary realignment over the generations, a fate that has befallen countless such monuments across Ireland. The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the national record in August 2011.

The ringfort sits atop a low rise in open farmland, and the entire interior and much of the surviving bank is now heavily overgrown with trees and bushes, which makes reading the earthworks on the ground something of a puzzle. The clearest sections of bank and fosse run from the north-east around to the east-south-east, where the profile is most legible. Visitors should be prepared for rough underfoot conditions and dense scrub; there is no formal access or signage. As with many such sites in agricultural settings, it is worth approaching the landowner beforehand and exercising care around the field boundaries that now cut across the monument's southern and western edges.