Growing a cereal crop over it was enough to erase it at ground level; the only surviving trace is a slight curve in a field bank along the western edge, a bend of around 20 metres that hints at the original arc of the enclosure beneath. It is the kind of feature that rewards a map rather than a walk.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means that by the mid-nineteenth century it was already sufficiently visible, or at least sufficiently known, to be worth noting. Its position is particular: set just off the eastern side of a hill summit, it looks out over a col, a low saddle of ground between two higher points, lying about 200 metres to the south-east, with a north-east to south-west ridge rising again some 600 metres beyond. That kind of placement, near the top of rising ground with clear sightlines across a natural pass, is common among embanked enclosures, which are circular earthworks defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, and which in Ireland can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval. The precise date and function of the Ballymacar example is not recorded, and the landscape has largely swallowed the evidence.

What remains is a cartographic ghost and a barely perceptible kink in a hedgerow, the kind of detail that passes unremarked for generations until someone checks an old map and looks again at the ground.