Yet the earthwork that once defined this place has effectively vanished at ground level. What remains is a slight curve in the southern field boundary, a gentle deviation in the hedgeline that may be the last physical trace of a rath, the circular earthen enclosure used by early medieval Irish farming families as a farmstead and cattle enclosure.

The site turns up clearly on a map surveyed between 1773 and 1774 by B. Scalé, where it is marked as a circular enclosure and given the name "Danish Fort". That label was a common eighteenth-century habit of attributing prehistoric or early medieval earthworks to the Vikings, a convenient but almost always inaccurate shorthand. The actual origins of raths in Ireland lie well before any Scandinavian presence, generally in the early medieval period roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Scalé map, catalogued among National Library of Ireland manuscripts, offers a useful snapshot of what was still legible in the landscape some two and a half centuries ago, even as the feature has since been levelled by centuries of agriculture. Notably, a second rath sits just forty metres to the south-east, which suggests this part of Ballybride was once a reasonably well-settled stretch of ground.