Enclosures of this kind, often referred to as ringforts, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a farmstead and its livestock. What makes Baunnaraha's enclosure notable, in a modest way, is simply its persistence as a recorded feature across the long gap between two significant mapping exercises.

The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1839 as part of the most detailed and systematic cartographic survey Ireland had seen to that point, and it reappears, still recognisable, on the revision carried out around 1900. That sixty-year span of consistent documentation suggests a feature that had not been ploughed away, built over, or otherwise erased during a period when many similar earthworks across the Irish countryside were disappearing under agricultural pressure. The diameter of approximately twenty-five metres falls within the typical range for a single-ditched enclosure, neither particularly large nor unusually small, but enough to have enclosed a modest farmyard and perhaps a handful of structures.