The settlement cluster at Ballynahinch is one of those sites that exists more convincingly in records and aerial photographs than it does underfoot, a place that was erased not once but twice, first by time and later by agricultural improvement.

The site sits on elevated ground overlooking the remains of a castle roughly 80 metres to the south-southwest. A seventeenth-century survey recorded by Simington in 1934 describes that castle as already demolished at the time of writing, though a bawn, essentially a defensive walled enclosure associated with a tower house or fortified residence, was still standing on one side of it, along with a thatched house and a few inhabited cabins. The cluster of buildings around the castle suggests a small but coherent settlement, the kind that would have gathered around a fortified centre across medieval and early modern Ireland. When aerial photography was taken in July 1967 by the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a researcher named Cahill examined the images and identified what appeared to be massive stone-cored banks and structural remains consistent with a medieval nucleated settlement, meaning a community of houses grouped closely together around a central point rather than dispersed across the landscape. A church lies roughly 250 metres to the north, adding further weight to the idea that this was once a place of some local consequence. Then, according to local information, came the late 1960s, when these same fields were intensively improved for pasture. Whatever the aerial photography had captured was buried or obliterated, and today the ground gives nothing away.