On the crown of a small, steep rise set among gently undulating pasture, a ringfort once stood, its circular earthen bank enclosing a farmstead that probably dates back to the early medieval period. Ringforts, raised by farmers and their families roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, were the most common form of defended settlement in early Ireland, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one, however, has not fared well.

By the time anyone thought to formally record it, the damage was already done. The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map annotates the spot as a "Fort" and depicts it as a D-shaped earthwork lined with trees, which suggests it was still a legible, even distinctive, feature of the landscape at that point. At some stage after that survey, the monument was levelled, and by 1970 a site visit confirmed that no surface remains were visible at all. What survives now is a cropmark, the faint ghost of buried features showing through as subtle differences in vegetation growth, barely detectable on aerial photography. A second enclosure lies roughly 145 metres to the south-east, a reminder that this particular hillside once held more than one focus of early settlement activity.

For anyone walking the fields at Balrath today, there is genuinely little to see with the naked eye. The real interest lies in what the 1837 map preserves: a D-shaped outline that hints at how the fort once sat on its rise, tree-lined and probably prominent in the local landscape for centuries before someone decided to clear it away entirely.