At Ballynaparka, on the crest of a low ridge currently given over to pasture, there was once a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a homestead. Today, that enclosure has been levelled so completely that no bank, no ditch, and no hollow survives. The only residual clue is the ridge itself, whose crest remains unusually flat, a faint geometric ghost where the interior ground was once worked and occupied.

The site is known primarily because it was captured, briefly and precisely, by the Ordnance Survey's first major mapping effort of Ireland. The 1842 six-inch map shows a hachured circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter sitting atop the ridge. Hachuring was the cartographic convention used by OS surveyors to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, drawn as short lines radiating inward to suggest relief. That mid-nineteenth-century record is now the principal evidence that anything was here at all. At some point between that survey and the present, the banks were removed, most likely during agricultural improvement, when such earthworks were routinely cleared to make fields more workable. Thousands of ringforts across Ireland were lost in the same way, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.