The arrangement is not especially dramatic to look at, but it represents something that happened quietly across Ireland throughout the twentieth century: a pre-Christian or early medieval monument absorbed into the ordinary fabric of domestic life, its boundaries redrawn by a planning application rather than centuries of gradual erosion.

The enclosure at Dunbell Big was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 as a roughly circular form, approximately 36 metres in diameter, lying immediately to the west of a small farmyard. A field boundary ran close to its south-western edge. Circular enclosures of this kind, often called ringforts or raths, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period in Ireland, their banks and ditches defining a family's living and working space. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping in 1900, only a portion of the north-eastern perimeter was still being indicated, suggesting the monument had been substantially levelled in the intervening decades. Then, around 1980, a bungalow was built within the interior, completing what the intervening years of agricultural activity had begun. The north-eastern bank of the enclosure does survive, upstanding, as the one portion that has held its ground through all of it.