The site at Ballybaun was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is an earthen enclosure typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD to define and defend a single farming household. This one sat on the east-facing slope of a ridge and measured approximately 40 metres in diameter, placing it comfortably within the range of a modest but respectable homestead.

When surveyors visited in July 1982, a substantial arc of the original earthen bank was still legible on the ground, sweeping from the east-northeast, around through the south, to the west-northwest. It had been recorded earlier on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a clearly circular enclosure, which suggests the bank had retained much of its shape well into the twentieth century. That changed around 1985, when the area was landscaped as part of the Gort golf course. An embanked green was constructed directly on the site, burying or displacing whatever remained of the original earthwork. The rath, in other words, did not vanish gradually into farmland or forestry as so many do; it was converted into a putting surface.

There is a particular irony in the fact that golf course construction, which so often mimics ancient earthworks with its sculpted mounds and contoured greens, should here have obscured the real thing. The site is no longer visible as an archaeological feature, but it remains on record as a reminder that the Irish landscape carries layers of occupation in places where the surface gives no sign of it.