The tension between those two assessments is, in its quiet way, the whole story.

The second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1897 and 1898, shows a circular enclosure roughly 24.5 metres in diameter, defined by a bank and sitting just to the west of the public road. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, most of them remnants of early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads rather than military fortifications, typically used for settlement and the protection of livestock. Whether this particular example was ever a ringfort, a field boundary of later date, or something else entirely is not recorded. What is recorded is its absence: when the site was examined in 1985, no visible surface trace of the enclosure remained. The bank had gone, or sunk below the grass, or been levelled at some point in the intervening century between the mapmakers and the field surveyors.

What the Glanballyma enclosure offers, then, is less a physical experience than a cartographic one. The 1897 map captured something that the landscape has since absorbed entirely, leaving only the coordinates and a circle on ageing paper as evidence that anything was ever there.