The site at Ballyvorisheen was once a circular earthwork enclosure roughly 25 metres across, the kind of defended farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families would have called home. Today the earthwork appears to have been levelled, flattened back into the pasture that surrounds it. Yet aerial photography has caught it out: a curved cropmark tracing the arc of the original fosse, the encircling ditch, running from south to north across the field. Soil disturbed long ago by digging holds moisture differently from undisturbed ground, and crops or grass above it grow at a slightly different rate, leaving a ghostly outline readable only from altitude.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937 each show the enclosure marked with hachures, the cartographic shorthand for a raised or embanked feature, which suggests it was still at least partially upstanding across those decades. Sometime after 1937, the earthwork was evidently removed. The site does not stand alone in this landscape: another ringfort lies in an adjoining field roughly 45 metres to the west, and a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with early medieval settlement, sits about 50 metres to the north-east. The clustering of these features suggests a locality that was once considerably more settled than its present pastoral quiet implies.

A visit to the field itself proved difficult for at least one recorder, who noted that close inspection was impossible owing to a hostile animal in residence. The aerial cropmark remains the clearest evidence of what survives, and the wider townland repays attention even from the road, given the density of early medieval remains in the immediate area.