That kind of gradual erasure is not unusual for early medieval enclosures in Ireland, but the gap between what was described and what was later found at Ballyvullaun is striking enough to give pause.

In 1952, a researcher named McCaffrey documented the site as a probable cashel, the term used for a stone-walled ringfort, typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to tenth centuries. The structure he recorded was substantial on paper: a roughly circular enclosure about 33 metres in diameter, defined by a wall of rocky spill, meaning loose stone spread outward from a collapsed or degraded wall core, some 7.3 metres wide and standing nearly a metre high. By the time anyone inspected the site again, in May 1992, the picture had changed considerably. The wall had effectively vanished as a readable structure, and what remained was a grassy, stony mound measuring 38 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, its oval shape suggesting some underlying archaeology but offering little else to the eye. Whether the intervening decades brought further agricultural activity, stone robbing, or simply the slow settling of already collapsed material is not recorded.