Classified as an earthwork, the feature at Clonbealy is, at its core, a roughly circular area swallowed by dense overgrowth, with no clearly surviving enclosing bank or ditch, and a rock outcrop pushing up through the interior. It has been noted as being of doubtful antiquity, which in archaeological terms is a careful way of saying that nobody is yet certain whether this is a man-made feature at all, or simply a quirk of the natural landscape that bears a passing resemblance to something older.

The honest difficulty here is that the vegetation cover makes detailed examination impossible. Circular earthworks in Ireland, when they do turn out to be genuine, often belong to a broad category of enclosures associated with early medieval settlement or farming, sometimes serving as a ringfort or a cattle enclosure, sometimes with a ritual or funerary function that is harder to pin down. But the condition of this site, and the protruding bedrock in what would be the interior, leaves the question genuinely open. The Mulkear River, which the ridge overlooks to the west, flows through a stretch of north Tipperary that does have a wider scatter of early historic and prehistoric remains, so the location is not implausible for a feature of some age. It is simply that the site itself has not yet yielded enough to say so with confidence.