The feature at Ballyclemock is easy to miss, yet it carries within its modest dimensions a quiet complexity: what looks like a simple grassy clearing is in fact the remnant of an embanked or moated enclosure, its outer fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, now visible mainly as a band of lusher, darker vegetation running around the perimeter.

The site's recorded history illustrates how the same piece of ground can shift in interpretation across generations of mapmakers. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area in 1839, the feature was plotted as a rectangular embanked or moated enclosure, roughly 40 metres north to south and between 25 and 35 metres east to west. Moated enclosures of this kind are typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland, where a raised platform surrounded by a water-filled or wet ditch served as the defended site of a manor house or farmstead. By the time the OS revised the map in 1925, the recorded shape had changed: the enclosure was now shown as a subcircular hachured feature, somewhat larger at approximately 50 metres by 40 metres. Whether this reflects a genuine reappraisal of what surveyors found on the ground, a change in how the earthwork had weathered over the intervening decades, or simply a different cartographic convention, is difficult to say. On the ground today the visible element is a grass-covered circle of around 30 metres in diameter, defined by a slight scarp, with the fosse beyond it measuring between 2.5 and 4 metres wide.