In a field of level pasture on the outskirts of Ballina, flanked by housing and commercial buildings, lies a site that has been so thoroughly erased that nothing whatsoever remains above ground. No earthwork, no ridge, no shadow in the grass. The enclosure at Gorteen survives solely because a surveyor recorded it in 1837.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of that year shows a circular enclosure on this spot, the kind of feature that in an Irish context typically indicates a ringfort or related early medieval settlement enclosure, a roughly circular bank and ditch that once defined a farmstead or place of habitation. By the time later map editions were produced, it had already vanished from the cartographic record entirely, suggesting it was levelled sometime in the nineteenth century, most likely as agricultural land was consolidated or as the town of Ballina expanded outward. The rising ground to the north may once have given the enclosure a degree of natural prominence, though any sense of that relationship between the monument and its landscape has long since been absorbed into the surrounding development.