No wall encloses it, no carved stone names the dead, and yet the site is recorded as a burial ground. What makes it stranger still is what it appears to have been first: a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, typically built to enclose a farmstead and defined by a raised bank and an external ditch, known as a fosse. Someone, at some point, chose to bury their dead inside one.

What survives today is roughly half of a circular platform, around twenty metres across and no more than half a metre high, with traces of the original bank and its outer fosse still faintly legible in the ground. The other half has been lost, whether to agriculture, erosion, or simple time is not recorded. Ringforts were built in their thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, and they held a peculiar afterlife in the popular imagination long after they fell out of use, often regarded as fairy forts and left deliberately undisturbed. The reuse of a ringfort as a burial ground was not unheard of. The pre-existing enclosure offered a kind of ready-made sacred boundary, and the sense that such places already belonged to another order of things may have made them feel appropriate for the dead. At Ballaghmore, even that boundary is now only half present, and there is nothing on the surface to indicate who was buried here or when.