A circular earthwork, roughly twenty metres in diameter, once sat in relatively level ground that slopes gently away to the south-east. By the time anyone thought to look for it carefully, the field had been reclaimed for improved pasture, and the enclosure, whatever its age or purpose, had been erased from the surface of the land entirely.

The only firm record of it comes from the 1843 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most important documentary sources for Irish landscape archaeology, which captured the earthwork at a moment when it was still legible on the ground. Circular enclosures of this kind are a broad category in Ireland, encompassing everything from early medieval ringforts, which were typically farmsteads enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, to prehistoric ritual sites. Without further excavation or surviving surface features, it is not possible to say which this was. The site was compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised record uploaded in April 2018, suggesting it remains a matter of ongoing archaeological interest even in its absent state.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see here. The improved pasture has done its work thoroughly, and a visitor standing in the right field would have no way of knowing they were standing over anything at all. That is, in a quiet way, the point. The OS map entry and the monument record together preserve the outline of something that farming has otherwise consumed entirely. For anyone interested in how much of Ireland's archaeological landscape has simply disappeared into agricultural improvement over the past two centuries, Ballybetagh offers a useful, if invisible, case in point. The general area south of Dublin, towards the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains, has seen considerable land improvement over the centuries, and this enclosure is almost certainly not the only casualty.