That absence is itself the point. What once stood here was recorded on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map as a circular earthwork, labelled simply "Fort", sitting on the crest of the hill. By 1970, whoever visited found no surface remains whatsoever, and aerial photography has since confirmed that the monument has been entirely levelled into the surrounding farmland.

The original earthwork was most likely a mound or small ringfort, the kind of roughly circular enclosure built in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch and used as a farmstead or place of local significance. A ringfort of that type still survives about 145 metres to the northwest, which gives a sense of the landscape as it once was, dotted with such enclosures across the low hills. The Balrath mound, by contrast, exists now only in the cartographic record, a dot on a nineteenth-century map that gestures at something older and no longer recoverable from the ground itself.