The site at Ballybackagh is a cashel, a type of ringfort built from dry stone walling rather than earthen banks, and at nearly 38 metres in diameter it would once have been a commanding presence on this level grassland. Today, the wall has collapsed so thoroughly that across the south-eastern arc, from east-south-east to south-east, there is no visible trace of it at all.

Cashels were typically constructed during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household of some local standing. The dry stone technique, stacking carefully chosen stones without mortar, was well suited to areas of Connacht where stone was abundant and timber less so. At Ballybackagh, enough of the collapsed wall survives in other sections to give a sense of the original circuit, but the structure as a whole is poorly preserved, its stones long since spread, robbed out for field walls, or simply swallowed by turf and soil over the centuries. That partial erasure, the way one quadrant has vanished entirely while the rest subsides quietly into the grass, is its own kind of record of how thoroughly these places can be worn away when they fall out of use and out of memory.