During archaeological monitoring of the groundworks, a single linear field ditch came to light at Ballough, running east to west across the landscape. It is not a monument in any grand sense, more a groove in the earth, but what it contained tells a small, specific story about the people who worked this ground and what they left behind.

The ditch itself was carefully recorded before the road consumed it. It measured just over 42 metres in length, roughly 1.4 metres wide, and 0.7 metres deep, with steep, concave sides and a concave base, the kind of profile that tends to result from deliberate cutting rather than gradual erosion. Inside it, excavators recovered burnt and unburnt animal bone, around a hundred sherds of pottery spanning the medieval and post-medieval periods, and the preserved seeds of blackberries and raspberries. The pottery range suggests the ditch was in use, or at least accumulating material, across a broad stretch of time. The fruit seeds are easy to overlook in a finds report, but they hint at the hedged and scrubby edges of a working agricultural landscape, the kind of place where brambles colonise boundaries. The findings were published by Robert Chapple in 2004.

Ballough lies in north County Dublin, in an area of low, relatively flat ground that has been farmed continuously since at least the medieval period. The ditch itself no longer exists in any visible form; it was uncovered and recorded as part of a road scheme, not preserved in situ. There is nothing to see at the site today, and no marker to indicate what was found. Its value is archival rather than visual, a data point in the broader mapping of how this part of Dublin was organised, divided, and used across several centuries of agricultural life.