Around thirty metres across, it is defined by a bank and what appears to be a fosse, the shallow ditch that typically runs alongside such a bank as a companion feature, the spoil from digging one often used to raise the other. Taken alone, it might not seem remarkable. What makes the situation at Ballyelly more arresting is that this enclosure does not sit in isolation.

Within roughly thirty to thirty-five metres in either direction, two cashels cluster close by. A cashel is a dry-stone walled enclosure, broadly equivalent in function to an earthen ringfort, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of settlement and sometimes also for the protection of livestock. One cashel lies to the northeast, another to the south, and all three features sit within a larger field system that suggests sustained, organised land use across the area over a considerable period. North-facing slopes are not the most favoured ground for settlement, which makes the density of monuments here all the more curious. Whether the enclosure and the two cashels were in use simultaneously, or represent activity from different periods layered across the same ground, is not something the surface evidence alone can resolve.