The field is full of low undulations, and sitting just south of the road, roughly aligned with the abbey's east wall, is a trapezoidal earthen platform measuring approximately 36 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south. It is enclosed by low earthen banks on the east and west sides and by a scarp to the north, with a further bank running from its north-west corner down to a stream bed some 38 metres away. None of this announces itself dramatically. You would need to know what you were looking at.

The platform is thought to be part of the wider monastic complex associated with Ballybeg abbey, an Augustinian house whose visible remains stand just to the north. Roughly in line with the abbey's east wall, as noted by O Rahilly in 1994, its position strongly suggests a functional connection to the religious settlement rather than any independent origin. Closer to the river, three irregular mounds of earth and stone, averaging about 1.5 metres in height, add another layer of uncertainty. They may be the result of river drainage works, or they could be connected to a mill recorded at approximately this location on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the seventeenth-century mapping project that documented landholdings across Ireland in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars. Aerial photography by Dr D.D.C. Pochin Mould revealed still further earthworks across the field appearing as shadow sites, the faint cropmark or soil-mark traces that only show up under particular conditions of light and moisture, suggesting the visible remains are only part of what lies beneath the pasture.