Local people call it a fort, a word that in Irish rural usage typically refers to a ringfort, those circular enclosures of raised earthwork that dot the countryside and carry a strong folklore of fairy associations and ill luck for anyone who disturbs them. Whether this particular site was ever a ringfort in any archaeological sense is, however, genuinely uncertain.

The earliest cartographic record of the enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which depicts a sub-rectangular area roughly 38 metres in diameter, defined by a field boundary and enclosing a tree-planted interior. That combination, a clearly bounded, planted area of that shape and scale, led surveyors to consider the possibility that what survives is not a prehistoric or early medieval monument at all, but the remnant of a post-1700 tree plantation, the kind of ornamental or shelter planting that landlords and improving farmers occasionally established on Irish estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The site was never marked as an antiquity on any edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, which is itself suggestive; the OS was generally attentive to earthworks and enclosures of apparent age. When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 2000, no surface remains were visible. The earthwork, whatever its origins, had been levelled entirely into the surrounding pasture. What remains of the outline can now only be detected from above, in a Google Earth orthoimage taken in June 2018, where the ghost of the sub-rectangular boundary shows faintly in the crop or soil patterning of the field.

The site sits on a slight west-facing slope with moderate views in most directions, in land that is now ordinary grazing pasture. There is nothing to see on the ground. The interest here is almost entirely in the gap between what local memory preserves, the word fort, with all its weight of tradition, and what the documentary and physical record can actually confirm, which is very little. For anyone interested in how landscape memory works, or in the way oral knowledge and cartographic evidence can pull in different directions, the Ballycahane enclosure is a useful, if quietly frustrating, case in point.