What looks like a slight thickening of the ground turns out to be the remains of a stone wall, grass-covered and irregular in outline, enclosing a roughly oval space of around 38 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west. It is the kind of feature that would be easy to walk across without registering, yet aerial photography has allowed it to be traced clearly against the hillside.

The enclosure sits within what archaeologists describe as a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape preserves boundaries and divisions from more than one era of use, laid down over a long stretch of time by different communities with different needs. Such layered field systems are not uncommon across the west of Ireland, where thin soils and exposed limestone have sometimes preserved ancient land divisions that would have been ploughed away elsewhere. The Ailwee Hill enclosure is irregular in shape rather than the neat circular form associated with a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland. That irregularity, combined with its elevated position and its relationship to the broader field system around it, suggests it may belong to a different tradition of land management, though without excavation its date and precise function remain open questions.