It is still there, in principle. The 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it clearly enough, a ringed enclosure with a legible bank, the kind of mark that surveyors knew to record and local people once knew to avoid disturbing. But visit today and the monument itself is entirely consumed by vegetation, the boundary between ancient earthwork and encroaching scrub long since lost to the untrained eye.

The site belongs to a category of monument known as a rath or ringfort, the most common surviving archaeological feature in the Irish landscape. These were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, their circular banks and ditches defining a domestic space rather than a military one, providing security for a family, their livestock, and their grain stores. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, though many more have been levelled by agriculture or building over the centuries. The Ballyashea example was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with the entry uploaded in August 2011, by which point the monument had already been fully overtaken by the thorn growth that surrounds it.

For anyone attempting to locate it, the site sits within scrubland, which means access is likely to be awkward regardless of season. The thorn thicket that now covers the enclosure makes physical inspection of the bank difficult and potentially unpleasant without protective clothing. What a visitor can reasonably do is consult the 1923 OS six-inch map beforehand to get a sense of the enclosure's original dimensions and position, then look for the slight rise or irregular contour in the ground that the bank might still create beneath the vegetation. The circularity of the thicket itself may be the most visible clue that something deliberate lies underneath.