To a passing walker it might look like nothing more than a flattened hollow, but the interior drops away steeply towards a bank on the south-west side in a way that suggests deliberate shaping rather than accident of landscape. Something was once enclosed here, and the question of what has never been fully answered.

The site measures approximately 58 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west, making it a substantial feature by any reckoning. An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular earthwork defined by a bank and internal dip, is broadly consistent with the ringforts and enclosures built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, though the term covers a wide range of functions, from defended farmsteads to ceremonial or pastoral spaces. What gives the Paddock By. site a particular interest is its early cartographic record: it was marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 using hachures, the fine lines surveyors used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature, meaning it was still clearly legible in the landscape at that point and considered significant enough to record. The stone field fence that now traces part of its northern arc to south-south-west may preserve the line of an original bank, or may simply follow it opportunistically, a later boundary making use of whatever was already there.