A field of pasture on a gentle north-facing slope in Ballysimon holds no visible trace of the ringfort that once stood here, no earthwork, no ridge, no shadow in the grass that might betray the circular enclosure beneath. The land has swallowed it entirely.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and homestead by a family of some local standing. The one at Ballysimon was a single-ramparted example, meaning it had just one such enclosure, and it measured roughly thirty-three yards in diameter. By the time Bowman recorded it in 1934, it had already been levelled, noting its location on land then belonging to a W. Hanlon. What makes the site more than a footnote is the souterrain associated with it. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, built beneath or beside a ringfort, most likely used for cool storage or as a place of refuge. That subterranean element survives here, even where the fort above it does not, which is not unusual: earthworks are vulnerable to centuries of ploughing and pasture improvement, while what lies underground is sometimes left undisturbed simply because no one can see it to remove it.