A low, cashel-like wall, the kind more commonly associated with stone-built enclosures, overlies the inner earthen bank along its northern arc, suggesting that at some point the site was reinforced or partially rebuilt in a different construction tradition. It is the kind of small anomaly that repays a closer look.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. They range from simple single-bank enclosures to more elaborate multivallate examples like this one, where status and the need for defence or demarcation warranted the additional effort of a second bank and an intervening fosse, a defensive ditch, between the two. At Bellanaloob the inner bank still stands to a height of 1.4 metres, while the outer bank has been considerably reduced, levelled to just 0.2 metres between the south-east and north. The fosse between them is largely overgrown and infilled, as is common with earthworks that have been quietly subsiding under grass and scrub for a millennium or more. An entrance with a causeway survives on the eastern side, the causeway being a raised crossing over the fosse that would have formed the main approach into the enclosed interior, which measures a neat 33 metres across in both directions.