A turlough, for those unfamiliar with the west of Ireland's hydrology, is a seasonal disappearing lake, one that floods in winter as the water table rises through the limestone and drains away again come summer, leaving behind a distinctive wet grassland. On the low shelf beside this one, cartographers working on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps in 1842 recorded a circular earthwork roughly 35 metres in diameter, marking it with hachures, the fine radiating lines used to indicate an enclosure or raised feature. When the same maps were revised in 1921, the enclosure was hachured again, still present, still measurable. Today, reclaimed pasture covers the site, and there is nothing to see at ground level.

The gap between what the maps recorded and what the landscape now shows is itself the point of interest here. Circular enclosures of this kind are frequently the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward, in which a family and their animals would have sheltered within a raised earthen bank. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but many were levelled during land improvement schemes, particularly as agricultural reclamation intensified through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Drumcaran More enclosure sits on reclaimed pasture, which suggests its earthworks were cleared away at some point between that 1921 survey and the present day, absorbed into the improved field system surrounding the turlough's edge. The location itself, on a sheltered shelf of ground beside a water source that would have flooded seasonally, is consistent with early settlement patterns in the limestone lowlands of Clare.