Where the ground once held some visible trace of an early medieval enclosure, today there is nothing to see at all. No earthen bank, no ditch, no suggestion in the grass that anything was ever there. The site survives only on paper, in the cartographic memory of nineteenth-century surveyors who recorded it and, presumably, could still make it out.

Ringforts are the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen or stone banks, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as farmsteads or places of refuge. The example at Ballycrystal was noted on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1839, as a circular enclosure somewhere between thirty-five and forty metres in diameter, positioned just north of Ballycrystal House on a northwest-southeast ridge, with streams running roughly parallel on either side at distances of around 350 metres to the east and 400 metres to the west. That kind of elevated, well-drained position between watercourses is fairly typical of ringfort placement. By the time archaeological testing was carried out in 2010, however, excavation within fifty metres of the southwest of the site produced nothing of relevance. Whatever was once there has left no recoverable trace, either above or below the surface.