Something has shifted at Ballycraddock since the first Ordnance Survey teams passed through in 1840. What they recorded on their six-inch map was a small, neatly circular embanked enclosure, roughly 25 metres across. What survives on the ground today is rather different: a flat, overgrown area shaped more like a letter D, measuring approximately 35 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, sitting towards the foot of an east-facing slope with the ground dropping away sharply to the east. The discrepancy between the map record and the physical remains is quietly puzzling, and typical of the way these earthworks resist easy categorisation.

Embanked enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland, and their origins and functions vary considerably. Some are ringforts, the farmstead enclosures of the early medieval period; others may be later in date or serve purposes that are harder to pin down. At Ballycraddock, the enclosure is defined partly by an internal scarp, a kind of cut or step in the ground, running between 0.7 and 0.9 metres high along the southern and straight western sides. Elsewhere, particularly at the north-east, the boundary takes the form of an external scarp reaching up to 2.5 metres in height. The straight western side is itself a slight oddity, since true ringforts tend toward the circular, and that geometric irregularity, along with the D-shaped footprint, suggests the terrain played a significant role in shaping how the enclosure was laid out. A second enclosure lies immediately to the north.