No earthworks break the surface; there is nothing obvious to stop the eye. The settlement at Magherareagh, associated with the townland of Inch, has vanished so completely that it leaves the question of what it ever was slightly open to debate.

The place qualifies as a borough not through any surviving charter or formal historical record confirming that status, but through the argument advanced by the historian C.A. Empey in 1985. His reasoning turns on function rather than documentation: Inch operated as a manorial centre, and around it sat the full set of features that such a centre would attract. A motte, the flat-topped earthen mound built by Anglo-Norman lords as a base for a timber tower and a means of asserting control over new territory, once stood nearby. So did a church with its associated graveyard, and a castle. Together these elements suggest a planned, administered settlement of some consequence, the kind of place that drew people, processed rents and obligations, and gave a locality its organisational shape. That no historical document names it as a borough may simply reflect the unevenness of medieval record survival in Ireland rather than any absence of genuine urban or proto-urban activity on the ground.