But the earthworks at Ballinamona, in County Tipperary, occupy a quietly suggestive position: tucked against the south-east corner of a known ecclesiastical enclosure, on a north-facing slope of improved farmland, where the ground has been worked and reworked across many centuries.

What survives is a small L-shaped area, roughly 18 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west, with a short eastern return of about 12 by 11 metres. It is defined by a low bank to its west and north sides, the bank measuring around 3.35 metres across at its base but only 1.5 metres at the top, and rising just 0.2 metres above the interior. Two further linear earthworks extend outward from the bank of the ecclesiastical enclosure nearby, running roughly east to west. The longer of the two runs for 26 metres; the shorter, at 14 metres, partially dissolves into a scarp for a further 22 metres at its western end. A scarp in this context simply means the ground drops away sharply along one side, the remnant of a bank that has been reduced over time by ploughing or grazing. The ecclesiastical enclosure to which all of this connects is a separate monument, the circular or curvilinear boundary that typically marks an early Irish religious site, often a church or monastic foundation. The earthworks at Ballinamona adjoin rather than form part of it, sitting at its margin.

The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the first systematic large-scale mapping of Ireland, shows corresponding linear features in the same area, suggesting that at least some of what is visible today may represent old field boundaries, their origins perhaps agricultural rather than ceremonial. That ambiguity is part of what makes the site interesting: the banks are low enough to have been overlooked and old enough to appear on a map made nearly two centuries ago, and they sit in a landscape where the sacred and the practical have long been difficult to disentangle.