When fieldwork was carried out in 2007, the reality turned out to be rather more ambiguous. The rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly 36 metres east to west and just under 30 metres north to south, is of modern date. Its drystone walls, between 0.6 and 0.7 metres wide and standing up to a metre high, are competent and deliberate, with a clear entrance at the north end of the east side. Someone built this carefully. The purpose, however, remains unresolved.

The site sits on a fairly level karst landscape, the distinctive limestone terrain of County Clare where thin soils overlie fractured rock and field boundaries in drystone are entirely conventional. What makes Ballyryan slightly harder to read is the presence of two stones standing in the interior, roughly 0.8 metres apart, their dimensions carefully recorded but their function described simply as unknown. A second enclosure, D-shaped and somewhat smaller at 24 metres east to west and 15 metres north to south, is attached to the north side of the main structure, defined now only by the foundations of a drystone wall. The aerial photograph that first flagged the site, taken as part of the Geological Survey's aerial programme, showed the plan clearly enough to suggest antiquity. Ground inspection told a different story, though not a complete one.

What lingers here is the gap between classification and reality. The site was placed on the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again on the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 under the category of cashel, a designation that carries the weight of early Christian or prehistoric occupation. The 2007 inspection revised the date to modern, but left the two interior stones unexplained. An enclosure that was almost certainly not ancient, in a landscape where ancient things are genuinely common, with a pair of stones whose purpose nobody has yet accounted for.