The decision was practical enough, but it effectively sealed off a cluster of earthworks whose true nature remains unresolved. Before the topsoil went down, a digital terrain model of the site captured three small circular mounds, each between five and six metres in diameter, showing up as shallow ring ditches. They might be barrows, the low burial mounds characteristic of prehistoric funerary practice, defined by a surrounding ditch, or they might be nothing more than the residual impressions of old circular feeding troughs. The ambiguity is not a failure of investigation so much as a reflection of how much the archaeological record can resist a clean answer.

The broader landscape at Ballysheehan is unusually dense with medieval remains for a stretch of flat grassland. Within a radius of roughly 200 metres sit a motte and bailey, a fortified church, and a graveyard, all clustering together in a pattern that suggests a once-active settlement. A motte and bailey is a form of Norman defensive architecture, typically consisting of a raised earthen mound topped by a timber or stone structure, adjoined by an enclosed courtyard. Aerial photographs taken in 1967 and 1971 had already shown earthworks extending to the north and east of the church and graveyard, hinting at the outlines of buildings or enclosures that no longer survive above ground. The earthworks that ran eastward from the graveyard wall were the most visible of these traces, and it is this area that Purcell and Gowen, writing in 2000, suggested could represent the remnants of a deserted medieval village, one of many settlements across Ireland that contracted or vanished entirely during the upheavals of the later medieval period.