What makes the arrangement unusual is not grandeur but ambiguity. The enclosure is suboval in shape, roughly 95 metres along its longer axis, defined by a double-faced stone wall that stands only between 0.6 and 1 metre high and measures about 1.4 metres across at its southern stretch, with loose stone spilling on both its inner and outer faces. Moss covers the stonework, yet the wall does not read as ancient. It sits alongside something that almost certainly is.

The cliff-edge fort it accompanies is a separate, older structure, the kind of promontory or cliff-edge enclosure that appears across the west of Ireland, using sheer natural drops as a ready-made defensive line. The enclosure at Poulacarran was already plotted on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and 1920, so it has been a visible feature of the landscape for at least that long. Thomas Johnson Westropp, the Clare antiquarian who surveyed a great number of the region's earthworks and stone structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, visited and recorded it in 1911. His verdict was characteristically direct: he described it as a "slight, defaced structure" that was "either very late or rudely built." The phrasing suggests he found it difficult to place, neither convincingly prehistoric nor tidily medieval, sitting somewhere in the uncertain territory that many field monuments occupy when their original function has been worn away.