That, in a quiet way, is the point. A cluster of dwellings once stood here, visible enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1841, yet today not a stone course, not a foundation line, not a dip in the ground betrays that anyone ever lived on this gentle southward slope.

The earliest documentary trace comes from the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, one of the great Cromwellian-era land assessments carried out to establish ownership across Ireland following the wars of the 1640s. For Ballinenagh, the survey records 'one thatcht house and twelve Cabbins' and names two proprietors: Wm. Kenedy of Ballyneny and Phillip Glysane of the same, the latter noted as an 'Irish Papist', a designation the surveyors applied routinely to Catholic landowners in that period. The phrasing tells us something about the social texture of the place: a single thatched house of some relative standing, and a dozen cabins around it, suggesting a small settlement with at least a loose hierarchy. Nearly two centuries later, the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1841 still shows a cluster of buildings in the south-centre of the townland, confirming the settlement persisted well into the nineteenth century. Whatever happened after that, whether gradual abandonment, consolidation of holdings, or clearance, left no mark that survives above ground.