Somewhere beneath a private garden at Ballinattin, on the edge of a small cliff where the Garraun stream meets the Back Strand at Tramore, the outline of an ancient enclosure is still quietly legible in the grass. What gives it away is not stonework or earthwork in any dramatic sense, but rather the behaviour of the vegetation: a semicircular band of lush growth marks the line of a silted fosse, the defensive ditch that once defined the perimeter, while strips of drier grass on either side trace where enclosing banks once stood. The enclosure is D-shaped in plan, roughly fifty metres along its northwest to southeast axis and thirty metres across, and the fosse itself is four to five metres wide with a slightly concave profile.

This kind of enclosed site, where a ditch and bank combination defined a roughly circular or sub-circular space, is common enough in the Irish archaeological record, appearing across many centuries and serving purposes ranging from farmstead protection to ritual use. What makes this particular example quietly unusual is its position and its subsequent history. It sits at a topographically pointed location, perched above the stream just at the moment it opens out into the tidal Back Strand, suggesting the site was chosen with some awareness of the landscape around it. The 1925 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map is the only mapping source to record it clearly, which implies the enclosure was already losing definition by the early twentieth century. By the time archaeological attention caught up with it, the ground had been incorporated into a landscaped private garden, meaning the archaeological signature now survives largely as a pattern of differential vegetation growth rather than as any upstanding feature.