It has a monument number and a place on the official register of Irish archaeological sites, which is itself a kind of fact worth pausing on: the act of classification implies that someone, at some point, identified this feature as significant enough to protect and document.

Enclosures are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, and among the most varied. The term covers everything from the curving earthen banks of early medieval ringforts, which served as farmstead boundaries and status markers, to earlier prehistoric enclosures whose purposes remain genuinely uncertain. Without further detail specific to Ballynew, the category alone tells us that a boundary of some kind was constructed here, that it survives in some recognisable form, and that it drew the attention of surveyors who considered it worth recording. Mayo, a county with a dense and well-studied archaeological landscape, contains hundreds of such features, many of them embedded in farmland or visible only as faint cropmarks or earthwork ridges to a careful eye.