And so, sometime in the 1950s, it was. What had probably stood for well over a thousand years as a raised circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that in Ireland typically marks an early medieval settlement or a defended farmstead, was levelled in the space of a land improvement programme.

What survives is subtle but legible once you know what to look for. The enclosure sits on the crest of a natural rise in hilly terrain that slopes gradually to the south-east, a position typical of early Irish enclosed settlements, which were often placed on elevated ground for drainage and visibility rather than dramatic defensive effect. The circular form is still traceable on the ground, measuring roughly 40 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west. Along its northern quadrant, a field bank remains, about three metres wide and just under a metre high. Around the rest of the circuit, the original boundary survives only as a gently sloping scarp, a low step in the earth that marks where something more substantial once stood. The OPW description from 1956 recorded a dry stone wall of irregular shape, which suggests that whatever early earthen or stone construction had originally defined the space had already been partially reduced or reused by the time officials came to assess it.

The story of this site is as much about twentieth-century attitudes to the landscape as it is about the early medieval period. The Land Project, which ran from the 1950s onward, was a state-backed scheme to improve agricultural land across Ireland, and it resulted in the levelling of hundreds of earthworks deemed to be in the way of productive farming. Many enclosures of this type, sometimes called ring forts or raths, depending on their construction, were lost during those decades. At Ballylaffin, enough of the circular profile remains under pasture to give a quiet sense of what was once there, even if the official record dismissed it as nothing worth saving.