No earthwork rises from the grass, no wall curves through the field. The site is, in the language of archaeological record, entirely without visible surface trace, and yet it carries within its approximate forty-metre circle a layered history of enclosure, demolition, and quiet, persistent use.

A cashel is a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and at Ballyglass the stone in question was apparently substantial enough to attract the attention of Galway County Council in the 1940s, when it was removed and broken up for road-making. The landowner, speaking to the researcher C. McCaffrey in the early 1950s, confirmed what had been there and what had been taken. McCaffrey classified the site in 1952 as a circular earthen fort of approximately forty metres in diameter, though the question mark he attached to the classification reflects just how thoroughly the structure had been erased by then. Trees were planted in the interior, further obscuring any trace that might have remained. What the county engineers took for road fill was, in all likelihood, a dry-stone enclosure of early medieval origin, the kind of defended farmstead that once dotted the Irish landscape in considerable numbers.

What makes the site quietly arresting is not what was destroyed but what persists. Within the interior of this vanished enclosure lies a children's burial ground. These sites, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, were used for the burial of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. Their frequent association with older monuments, ringforts, early ecclesiastical sites, and prehistoric enclosures, speaks to a long continuity of place memory in the Irish countryside. The cashel wall is gone, the trees obscure the ground, but the burial ground remains, marking a circle that local knowledge never entirely forgot.