But the ground here once supported a small cluster of buildings that included a castle, a church, cabins, and a mill, all of them crowded into the triangular southern tip of Ballyroe townland, and most of them now gone without obvious trace.

The evidence comes from the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, the extraordinarily detailed mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to catalogue confiscated Irish land. The accompanying terrier, a written register describing landholdings, records that at a place called "Balliroe=Shortall" there was "a Castle & a Church and Cabbin with a Mill", and that the proprietor in 1640 had been Thomas Shortall, described as an Irish Papist. The castle and cabins appear on the Down Survey map within a triangular area that corresponds closely to the triangular southern tip of the townland as it still exists today. The mill and the church, curiously, do not appear on the map at all, though the terrier lists them plainly. What survives on the ground is a rectangular earthwork platform, roughly 25 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, edged along its eastern and southern sides by a wide berm and bounded on the west and north by a waterlogged fosse, which is a defensive ditch, fed on its northern side by a deliberately diverted stream. A road runs immediately east of the enclosure, and a stream along the southern edge was recorded as a ford on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839. The platform itself is the most likely location of at least one of the Down Survey buildings, possibly the castle or the mill. By 1900, the character of the field had shifted entirely; the revision maps of that year show a lime kiln, a structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, placed roughly in the centre of the field, with quarry pits and limestone outcrop visible across the surrounding ground, suggesting the site had long since passed into more prosaic use.