The category of earthwork covers a wide range of man-made or man-modified ground features, from the ditched enclosures of early medieval ringforts to field boundaries, burial mounds, and the collapsed remnants of structures whose original form is long lost. Which of these Ballymarkahan represents remains, for now, an open question.

Clare is a county with a dense archaeological record, shaped by thousands of years of settlement across its limestone plains, its drumlin country, and the edges of Lough Derg. Earthworks in this region can date anywhere from the Bronze Age through to the post-medieval period, and their significance is rarely apparent from the surface alone. Without the underlying site record, even the rough outline of this monument's story, its age, its function, its condition, remains out of reach for the casual enquirer.