A stream running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west divides the two fields, and the earthworks align themselves both parallel to it and at right angles, forming a sequence of square, rectangular, and irregular enclosures of varying dimensions. On the ground they are easy to miss; from satellite imagery, the pattern resolves into something deliberate and structured, a landscape that has clearly been divided and used in a systematic way.

The most significant feature sits towards the south of the eastern field: a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 43 metres by 70 metres, within which the foundations of at least one building are visible in the south-east corner, with a second possible structure immediately to its west. The dimensions and arrangement raise the possibility that this is the long-sought location of a medieval castle, one that has so far resisted precise identification on the ground. The castle is recorded in the Down Survey of 1655 to 1656, a seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned to document landholding in Ireland following the Cromwellian settlement. Both the barony map of Crannagh and the parish map of what was then called Bannogh alias Bannonough place a castle roughly centrally within the townland of Ballidonell, the name that corresponds to modern Ballydaniel. The earthworks at Ballydaniel were identified on the ground by Rory Carroll and corroborated by satellite imagery dated to 2011 to 2013, with the Down Survey connection drawing a thread between a seventeenth-century cartographic note and what may be its physical remnant, still faintly pressed into the pasture beneath.