It had survived, in some form, for well over a millennium, only to be levelled sometime after 1995, when it was last properly recorded. That quiet erasure makes what the surveyors documented that year feel more valuable: a precise, almost forensic portrait of something that is now gone.

A rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, enclosed by a circular bank and ditch for the protection of a family and their livestock. The Balloughadalla example sat in an unusual position, occupying a natural depression on a saucer-shaped terrace on a north-west-facing slope, with a wide view over low-lying bog and reclaimed pasture below. When inspected in 1995, it measured roughly 35 metres north to south and 33.3 metres east to west. Its earthen bank, about 1.6 metres wide, survived to a modest internal height of 0.7 metres at the south, though along the western arc it had been reduced to little more than a scarp. There were two gaps in the bank, one at the east measuring 2.8 metres across, another at the south-east at 2 metres, which may indicate original or later entranceways. Inside, the ground sloped gently down toward the south-east, and near the centre sat a low, sod-covered rise, barely 30 centimetres high, whose purpose was not determined. A shallow depression ran along the inner edge of the bank on the south-west arc. None of this is left now.