It is not a ruin in any conventional sense, carries no name attached to a dynasty or saint, and has left no trace in the written record. What it is, precisely, is an open question that has persisted since archaeologists first documented it.

The earthwork runs in two conjoined sections across slightly marshy ground, roughly a hundred metres west of the Lee. The larger section stretches 38.5 metres north to south, is 8.5 metres wide, and rises to an average height of one metre. A shorter section, 18.5 metres long and somewhat lower at 0.4 metres, joins it at the northern end. The land around it is marginal, given over to rough grazing and likely to flood. When Michael Connolly surveyed the Lee Valley in 1996 and 1997, he could assign no definitive function to the bank, though he noted a possible connection to a separate earthen bank forming part of an archaeological complex at Lissooleen, just over a hundred metres away on the eastern side of the river. Whether the two features were ever part of a single boundary, a water-management system, or something else entirely remains unclear. Linear earthworks of this kind, essentially elongated raised banks of earth, could serve many purposes in the Irish landscape, from enclosing land and marking territorial edges to managing livestock or redirecting drainage, but without excavation the Clogherclemin bank keeps its function to itself.