Ballycahill, also recorded as Ballyhaghill or Ballihaill, sits on a low rise in gently rolling countryside, and to look at it today there is little to suggest that this was once a place with burgesses, land transactions, and the administrative machinery of a colonial settlement.

The documentary record gives a glimpse of what the place once was, and also of how it declined. In 1303, the burgesses of Ballihaill paid £7, or 10.5 marks, for 8.5 carucates of land. A carucate was a unit of medieval land measurement, roughly the area a team of oxen could plough in a year, so this was a substantial holding. By 1338, however, the picture had changed considerably. Where the burgesses once rendered 8 marks, they were now paying only 20 shillings in times of peace, and nothing at all in time of war, the record explicitly noting this was "because of the Irish." That phrase, clipped and bureaucratic, captures something of the pressure that Gaelic resurgence placed on Anglo-Norman plantation boroughs across Ireland during the fourteenth century. Many such settlements shrank, were abandoned, or simply ceased to function as boroughs, leaving little more than a placename and the odd earthwork behind. In 2000, when archaeological testing was carried out ahead of construction of a public house and car park, excavator Brian Hodkinson uncovered a linear ditch with an eighteenth-century fill, along with a second feature that was not fully excavated. The medieval layers, if they survive, remain largely unexamined beneath the surface.