It sits in that curious category of Irish antiquities that are known to exist, have been noted and classified, but whose details remain largely unexamined by anyone outside a specialist archive.

An enclosure, in the broadest archaeological sense, refers to any defined area bounded by a wall, bank, ditch, or combination of these, and such features in the Irish landscape can date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period and beyond. They served many purposes, from enclosing a farmstead or ring-fort to demarcating a ceremonial or funerary space. Ballykildea is a small rural townland in Clare, a county whose limestone landscape preserves an extraordinary density of such features, many of them still visible as low earthworks or stone-built remnants in fields that have changed remarkably little over the centuries. Without more detailed documentation in the accessible record, it is not possible to say with confidence what period this particular enclosure belongs to, what form it takes on the ground, or what, if anything, has been found within or around it.