It is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. What may once have been a hut, the dwelling place of someone living within the enclosure's protection, has been reduced over centuries to the faintest hollowing of the ground, a shape you might walk across without registering as anything other than a dip in the field.

Ringforts, which are roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used primarily between the sixth and tenth centuries. They functioned as farmsteads, protecting a family, their livestock, and their stores. Structures built inside them, typically of timber or wattle, rarely survive above ground at all. At Balrath, set on a gentle rise in undulating pasture with open views stretching east, south, and west, this faint depression is what remains of what was once, in all likelihood, a place where someone slept, ate, and kept warm.