On a gentle slope facing north-west, a slight curve in an old field bank is about all that remains of what was once a rath, the type of enclosed farmstead, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, that was built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period. The curve, running roughly 27 metres from north-west to south-east, appears on the 1907 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map but not on later editions, which suggests the earthwork was already being absorbed into the agricultural landscape by the early twentieth century.

What survived longest was a large stone at the centre of the enclosure. Local tradition held the place to be a fort, and manuscripts collected during the Irish Schools' Folklore Scheme of the 1930s, in which schoolchildren recorded local lore and placename knowledge, noted both the fort and this stone as features of Ballagh. That stone was broken up around 1960 when the interior of the site was cleared of furze, the dense scrub of gorse that had, ironically, been protecting the ground beneath it. The clearing that erased the last physical trace of the monument was the kind of routine agricultural tidying that quietly removed thousands of such features from the Irish countryside during the mid-twentieth century, before the significance of what was being lost was widely appreciated.