Walk the ground today and you will find nothing: no walls, no banks, no boundaries of any kind. The landscape has been reclaimed and consolidated since the mid-1990s, and what was once recorded as a distinct archaeological feature has been absorbed into larger, working fields. What survives is a ghost, legible only from the air.

Aerial photography does recover something of the site, though the picture it offers is complicated. The field boundaries that remain faintly visible from above correspond to those shown on Ordnance Survey maps from 1939, suggesting they are relatively recent in origin rather than ancient. More interesting, perhaps, is what the same aerial record revealed that nobody had previously documented: a crop mark enclosure partially overlapping the south-east corner of the field system. Crop marks appear when buried or destroyed features affect the growth of vegetation above them, making otherwise invisible archaeology readable from altitude. This enclosure appears to have been univallate, meaning defined by a single bank or ditch, and roughly 40 metres in diameter. A second possible enclosure, recorded with an approximate diameter of 58 metres, is also noted in the same area. A further previously unrecorded enclosure lies immediately to the south. A separate monument to the east, which had been formally listed, is itself destroyed, with no trace remaining at ground level either. The research underpinning these observations comes from Michael Connolly's 2008 doctoral thesis on prehistoric settlement in the Lee Valley near Tralee, which examined this landscape from a broad regional perspective.

What makes Barrakilla quietly instructive is precisely what is no longer there. The field system itself may have been unremarkable in age, but the agricultural changes that erased it also obscured at least two enclosures that nobody had thought to record. It is a reminder that consolidation and reclamation do not simply tidy a landscape; they can quietly close the archive.