It has been levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface trace, and the ground above it gives nothing away. What makes this particular absence interesting is how precisely its disappearance can be tracked across a sequence of maps.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically a roughly circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The one at Ballycunningham measured approximately thirty metres in diameter, and it appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, drawn as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork of this kind. By the time the same area was mapped again in 1903, a field boundary had already cut across the northeastern side. The 1938 revision shows the same truncation, the modern agricultural landscape quietly encroaching. Writing in 1939, P. J. Hartnett noted that the fort was by then "enclosed all round by modern banks", meaning the original earthwork had been absorbed into, or replaced by, the working field system around it. At some point after that, whatever remained was levelled altogether.

There is nothing to see at Ballycunningham, and that is, in its own way, the point. The site is a useful reminder that early medieval Ireland was once densely scattered with these enclosures, tens of thousands of them across the country, and that a great many have quietly disappeared under centuries of farming. The maps are the only record left.