A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches that once served as a farmstead and family enclosure during the early medieval period, once occupied a north-facing slope at Ballyellis. Today there is nothing to see. The site has been levelled, leaving no visible surface trace of the structure that once stood here.

The evidence for its existence comes from the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, on which it was recorded as a hachured circular enclosure approximately forty metres in diameter. Hachured markings were the cartographic convention used by nineteenth-century OS surveyors to indicate the raised banks and sloped edges of earthworks, and their presence on the 1842 sheet confirms that the rath was still a legible feature of the landscape at that point. Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with estimates running to tens of thousands of surviving examples across the country, yet a significant proportion have been lost to agricultural improvement, development, and land clearance over the past two centuries. The Ballyellis example appears to have been one of those casualties, its earthworks removed at some point after the mid-nineteenth century and the ground subsequently incorporated into what is now golf course terrain.