The slight rise still detectable in the soil is all that remains above ground of what was once a roughly circular enclosure about fifty metres across, the kind of raised and banked farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families called home.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is essentially a defended farmyard, typically enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and most date to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. This one at Ballygrace appeared clearly on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, again in 1905, and once more in 1937, each time shown as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork. By the time of the 1905 and 1937 surveys, the interior had been planted with trees, a common fate for ringforts that had outlived their original function but still occupied farmable ground. Sometime in the 1970s, according to local information, the earthwork was levelled entirely, the trees presumably cleared and the banks pushed flat to make cultivation easier. An aerial photograph taken in May 1977, not long after the levelling, captured what the ground had already begun to say: a circular soilmark outlining the old bank, and a distinct oval-shaped dark spread near the north-west portion of the enclosure, the kind of discolouration that often signals disturbed or organically enriched earth where a structure once stood.