No earthwork breaks the surface, no bank or ditch marks the ground, and yet something was once considered significant enough to single out by name on an eighteenth-century map.

In 1787, a surveyor named Mathews mapped the townlands of Ballykealy and recorded several circular features, each associated with trees. Such clusters were common in the Irish landscape and often indicate the presence of a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used as a farmstead and defended by an earthen bank and ditch. On Mathews's map, several of these circular, tree-ringed features appear in close proximity, but only one carries a label: "forth". That word, an anglicisation of the Irish "ráth" or a related term, was the common local name for a ringfort, and its appearance here suggests that whoever Mathews consulted, or whatever tradition he was drawing on, recognised this particular feature as something distinct from the others nearby. Whether it was already fading from the landscape in 1787, or whether it disappeared in the centuries that followed through agriculture or development, nothing of it can now be seen on the ground.