The site at Battstown spreads across roughly one and a half hectares of undulating grassland, and what it holds is easy to miss: low banks, shallow enclosures, irregular hummocks that barely interrupt the surface of the land. These are the kind of traces that reward close attention, because they represent a settlement that was abandoned sometime in the medieval period and has been slowly subsiding into the earth ever since.

The earthworks at Battstown consist of at least four distinct enclosures that can still be clearly defined, along with a northern section of the site where the ground becomes more disturbed and uneven. That northern area, with its irregular banks and raised ground, is thought to mark the location of former house sites, the foundations and floors of structures long since collapsed and overgrown. A small stream, which runs approximately fifty metres to the north and marks the townland boundary with Johnstown, would have made this a practical location for a medieval community, providing both a water source and a natural boundary. Deserted medieval settlements of this type are found across Ireland, many of them victims of the demographic collapse that followed the fourteenth-century plague outbreaks, though others were abandoned for more local reasons including soil exhaustion, shifts in landholding, or simple economic decline.