The enclosure at Ballinphunta sits near the bottom of a north-east-facing slope, on land that has long since been absorbed into improved pasture, and when the site was inspected in 1999, no visible surface traces were obvious.

What the maps do preserve is a reasonably clear picture of what was once there. The first edition OS six-inch map of 1842 showed the feature using hachures, the small lines surveyors used to indicate earthen banks and raised boundaries, and both the 25-inch plan of 1897 and the Cassini edition of 1920 continued to record it in the same way. The 1897 survey is the most detailed, describing a subcircular enclosure with estimated diameters of roughly 38 metres east to west and 33 metres north to south. Its boundary was not uniform: an earthen bank defined the south-western, western, northern, and south-eastern portions, while elsewhere the enclosing element was a scarp, meaning a natural or cut slope rather than a built-up bank. Enclosures of this general type are found across Ireland, and while they are often associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes functioning as the enclosed farmsteads known as raths or ringforts, the notes for this one carry no firm dating or attribution.

What makes this site quietly telling is less what it was than what happened to it. Agricultural improvement, particularly the levelling, drainage, and reseeding of pasture land, has erased countless features of this kind across the Irish countryside. Three generations of cartographers thought it worth marking on their maps; the land itself no longer shows the reason why.