When the site was inspected more than a century and a half later, in 1989, only one of those enclosures remained visible.

Ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures that served as farmsteads and homesteads across early medieval Ireland, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, with tens of thousands recorded across the island. Yet common does not mean stable. These earthworks are vulnerable to agriculture, to drainage work, to the slow pressure of the plough, and Ballinastoe appears to be a case where the historical record and the physical reality have quietly diverged. Whether the two enclosures were always distinct features or formed a single conjoined structure is a question the 1838 map raises without quite answering. By the time anyone looked closely in the late twentieth century, one of the two had gone, or had become indistinguishable from the surrounding ground.