A small circular enclosure, roughly sixteen metres across, was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, sitting on low-lying ground near the River Goul. By the time surveyors returned for the 1900 edition, it had vanished from the map entirely, and today nothing is visible at ground level. The place is, in the most literal sense, an absence.

Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular earthworks defined by a bank or ditch, are relatively common features of the Irish landscape, often associated with early medieval settlement or land division. What makes the Ballyellis example quietly melancholy is the narrow window its documentary record reveals. The 1839 Ordnance Survey map, produced during the first comprehensive cartographic survey of Ireland, caught the enclosure while it still had some physical presence. The sixty or so years between that survey and the 1900 revision were apparently enough for it to be levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement or simple neglect, until the ground closed over it altogether. The River Goul flows some 220 metres to the south-east, and the surrounding land is described as rolling grassland with open views in all directions, which makes the erasure feel all the more complete. There is nothing here now to interrupt the eye.