That absence is precisely the point. A roughly oval earthwork enclosure, measuring around twenty metres across its east-west axis and ten metres north to south, once occupied this ground. By the time anyone thought to record it formally, it had already been erased.

The enclosure was still visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, drawn during the first great systematic mapping of the Irish countryside. Enclosures of this kind are generally understood to be the remains of ringforts, the circular or oval banked settlements that served as farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet they have been disappearing steadily for generations. At Ballyda, agricultural tillage on that sloping ground finished the job. Writing in 1923, the local historian Power noted that two such forts in the area had been levelled within living memory, a phrase that places their destruction somewhere in the decades straddling the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No surface trace survives today.