That last detail gives it a peculiar character among the countless ringforts scattered across the Irish landscape.

A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and external ditch, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and place of security. The Ballyduhig example appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1841 to 1842 and again on the revised edition of 1914 to 1915, suggesting its outline was legible above ground across at least two surveying generations. By 1974, when the Geological Survey of Ireland was conducting aerial photography, the feature showed up as a possible crop mark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that betrays buried or partially levelled features beneath. The qualification "possible" is telling: without a ground inspection, certainty was out of reach. When surveyors working on the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by C. Toal, attempted to visit the site, permission to enter the land was refused. The ringfort has therefore never been formally assessed, and what lies within or beneath the enclosure remains unrecorded.