The enclosure at Ballymacshaneboy is easy to miss, and that is rather the point. What was once a clearly defined raised area has been partially levelled, quarried at its north-eastern edge, and absorbed into the agricultural landscape around it, yet enough survives to reward a careful eye.

The site has a documented history of gradual disappearance. When the Ordnance Survey mapped it at six-inch scale in 1840, it appeared as a raised circular area defined by a scarp, the kind of earthwork feature that would have been immediately recognisable to surveyors familiar with the Irish countryside. By the time the twenty-five-inch edition was produced in 1897, the shape had shifted in the record to a D-form, with the scarp incorporated into a field boundary running from the south-west around to the south-east, and truncated on the southern side by a field boundary running east to west. Enclosures of this type, raised circular or subcircular areas defined by an earthen bank or scarp, are a common but often poorly understood feature of the Irish landscape, and may represent the remains of a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead used from roughly the early medieval period onward. By the time archaeologists from the Archaeological Survey of Ireland surveyed the site in 1999, the field boundary visible on the historic maps had vanished entirely from the surface, and the scarp itself measured just 0.6 metres wide and 1.6 metres high along its surviving western to eastern arc. The raised interior still slopes slightly to the north. The work was compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the record in November 2021.

The site sits on a moderate north-north-westerly facing slope with open views stretching from west to east, which gives some sense of why someone may have chosen the spot originally. For anyone trying to locate what remains, satellite imagery is genuinely useful here; the curving northern arc of the levelled monument was still visible on Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages taken between 2011 and 2013, showing up as a faint arc in the pasture. On the ground, the surviving scarp runs from west through north to east, and the quarrying damage in the north-east corner is the most obvious sign of disturbance. The southern portion, where the old field boundary once defined the edge of the enclosure, has left no trace at ground level.