Somewhere beneath the undulating pasture of this south Tipperary slope, the ghost of a substantial ringfort persists only in a sketch plan drawn in haste before the earthworks were razed. The rath, as these enclosed circular farmsteads of early medieval Ireland are commonly known, vanished from the landscape in 1957, leaving the ground to return quietly to grazing land.

Before demolition was completed, whoever documented the site left a reasonably detailed record. The enclosure measured 35 metres across in both directions, a notably regular circle, bounded by an earthen bank between 2.4 and 3 metres wide. The bank was not uniform in height: it rose highest above the surrounding ground on the eastern and western sides, and highest above the interior on the southern quadrant, suggesting a carefully shaped defensive or boundary profile rather than a simple thrown-up mound. What the demolition itself revealed was more intriguing still. Workers uncovered a small, roughly circular patch of burnt earth and charcoal in the western quadrant, roughly 70 centimetres across and only 15 centimetres deep, the kind of feature that might indicate a hearth or a localised burning episode. From the northeastern quadrant came two small finds: a hone stone, used for sharpening blades, and a spindle whorl, the small perforated disc that weighted a hand spindle during textile production. Ordinary objects, in other words, from an ordinary domestic life lived inside those banks sometime in the early medieval centuries.

The site today offers no visible trace, and the finds and drawn record are held in the National Museum of Ireland Topographical file rather than on the ground. What the Ballycurkeen rath leaves behind is a reminder of how much of Ireland's early medieval settlement pattern has been erased incrementally, one levelling at a time, and of how much can be recovered, even partially, when someone thinks to draw the plan before the machinery moves in.