When someone actually came to look at it in 1998, the wall turned out to be of loose, modern construction, heavily overgrown and far removed from the ancient defensive architecture the label implied. What remains is an oval of roughly 23 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, its interior flat and grass-covered, sitting on fertile lowland with the sea about 300 metres to the west.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1905, may have included this spot among what he described as seven or eight defaced forts at a place called Shanbally in Ballyryan, though the connection is tentative. Westropp was a prolific recorder of Clare's field monuments, and his early surveys documented earthworks and stone enclosures across the county at a time when many were already degraded or misidentified. The Ballyryan enclosure followed a similar trajectory, sitting in the official Record of Monuments and Places under a classification that later inspection could not support. Whether it was ever a cashel proper, a later field enclosure repurposed or rebuilt in stone, or simply something that accumulated a misleading label over time, is not straightforward to say. The overgrowth that now covers much of the wall makes closer reading of the structure difficult.