The bank rises barely thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground, and in places it has faded to almost nothing, yet the shape it describes, roughly thirty metres along its longer axis and fourteen metres across, is deliberate and old, and its position tells a quiet story about how people once organised space around their most defended places.

The enclosure sits pressed against the south-eastern side of a moated site, a class of medieval earthwork in which a residential or agricultural area was surrounded by a water-filled ditch, common in Ireland from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward and often associated with Anglo-Norman settlement. The relationship between the two features here is intimate: the external bank of the moated site actually completes part of the enclosure's circuit, suggesting that what survives in Ballinulty may be an annexe, an outer compound appended to the main defended area, perhaps for keeping livestock, storing goods, or sheltering dependants. The earthen scarp that defines the annexe's own boundary is broadest and best preserved along the south-east to west-north-west stretch, becoming very faint on the remaining sides. A short section of what may be original bank, about three metres long and standing to an external height of roughly forty-five centimetres, survives at the north-west corner where the two earthworks meet. No original entrance can now be identified. The interior is level and clear of overgrowth, which at least makes the outlines legible to anyone willing to read the slight rises and falls of the turf for what they are.