The enclosure at Carrowbaun sits on the western side of a gentle rise in County Mayo, where improved pasture gives way to rougher, wettish ground below. What makes it particularly curious is how legible its disappearance has been, documented in stages across maps, inspections, and land-clearance works, each one catching the site at a slightly diminished state.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a roughly circular embanked enclosure, somewhere between 30 and 35 metres in diameter, already bisected centrally by a north-south road. By the 1931 edition, the cartographic picture had shifted: the feature was shown as a subrectangular area of roughly 45 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, the road now forming its western boundary and a field boundary defining its southern edge. Local information suggests it was partially levelled in the early 1980s. When a field inspection was carried out in 1997, what remained was a raised rectangular area defined by a barely perceptible levelled scarp to the south and west, merging almost indistinguishably with the natural slope. To the north, a shallow depression, possibly a fosse (a defensive ditch associated with enclosures of this type), was still faintly readable, with a low external bank rising to around 0.7 metres on its outer edge. The road to the east had itself risen in level, roughly following the north-south profile of the enclosure, suggesting the buried archaeology extended beneath it. On the far side of that road, a dense thicket of blackthorn runs parallel to the enclosure for roughly ten metres, though nothing archaeological is visible within it. Immediately to the northwest, two raths sit on a ridge above the site; a rath is a type of early medieval circular earthwork enclosure, typically interpreted as a defended farmstead. Their presence on the overlooking ridge adds a layer of complexity to what this lower enclosure might once have been.

The 1997 inspection recorded the site in a fragile but partially legible condition. Subsequent to that visit, reclamation works destroyed the northern two thirds of what had survived. What remains now is the southern portion, along with the faint topographic memory carried in the road itself.