The enclosure at Ballybrada was levelled by the landowner approximately two decades before records were compiled, leaving the ground to tillage. What survives is subtle: a faint raised area, a slight dip along the eastern and western edges where the bank once met the interior, and, from the air, a crop-mark that traces the circle back into legibility. An aerial photograph taken by Gillian Barrett on 20 August 1991 caught it at exactly the right angle and season, the differential growth of crops above disturbed soil drawing the vanished monument back into view.

The enclosure belongs to a broad category of circular earthworks found across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, to later ecclesiastical or ceremonial sites. The Ballybrada example does not fit neatly into any single type, but earlier mapping offers a few clues to its character. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, shows it sitting in open ground with trees visible in the interior, a configuration sometimes described as a tree-ring and associated with sites that had already acquired a degree of local significance or deliberate planting. By the time the second edition appeared in 1906, the enclosure was shown as an oval, its southern edge partially absorbed into a field boundary, which suggests the process of agricultural encroachment had already begun well before the final levelling. What had once been a distinct monument in its own open field was, within decades, becoming a footnote in the geometry of farm boundaries.