At Glanballyma, that gentle undulation in the ground marks the ghost of a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure of the kind that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. This one measured roughly 29 metres across, its perimeter formed by an earthen bank, and it sat on a north-northwest-facing slope where the land tilts quietly down toward the valley.

The second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced between 1897 and 1898, recorded it clearly as a circular feature, its bank running from west to south and merging along the southwest arc with a field boundary. That boundary partly survives, and with it a small stretch of the original enclosing bank, preserved almost incidentally because the field wall was built along its line. Elsewhere, the bank is gone. The landowner has said the ringfort was levelled at some point between 1965 and 1970, a period when agricultural improvement schemes and the pressure to bring more land into productive use saw many such earthworks cleared across rural Ireland. What the map captured in the late nineteenth century, and what the field boundary quietly held onto, is now mostly a matter of a slight change in gradient across a grazing field.