No humps in the field, no crop marks obvious to the casual eye, no signpost marking the spot. The settlement at Ballyconra came to light not through excavation but through geophysical survey, the kind carried out in 2017 in advance of a proposed solar farm. What the instruments revealed was a ghost streetscape: a row settlement roughly 500 metres long, fronting onto what was once a street, its rectangular plots laid out with a regularity that suggests deliberate planning rather than gradual organic growth.

The western stretch of the row, about 200 metres of it, comprises eleven or twelve plots of broadly equal proportion, each running roughly 40 metres north to south and between 15 and 20 metres east to west, with a house positioned at the southern end of most plots. This kind of regular, conjoined plot arrangement is characteristic of planned medieval or early modern settlements, sometimes called street villages or row villages, where properties were laid out uniformly along a central thoroughfare. The eastern end of the row is less clearly defined and curves slightly northward. Beyond the plot boundaries, field boundaries extend northward, and the westernmost of these cuts through what may be an even earlier enclosure. Geophysics identified at least ten further enclosures in the surrounding area, suggesting the landscape was far more densely occupied at some point than its present emptiness implies. A parish terrier compiled alongside the Down Survey maps of 1655 to 1656, an ambitious mid-seventeenth-century effort to map land confiscated after the Cromwellian wars, recorded that Ballyconra townland contained 'a castle partly in repaire, a weare and cabins with an old church'. That cluster of structures, the castle to the east, the weir, the cabins and the church, paints a picture of a small but functional settlement community that had, by that point, already seen better days.

The settlement itself leaves no trace above ground, but the adjoining field to the south, surrounding Barney church and its graveyard, does preserve earthworks thought to be connected to the same complex. The church and graveyard are visible features in the landscape, and it is there, at ground level, that some physical sense of this otherwise buried place survives.