The rectangular house that once stood inside this irregular enclosure is long levelled, but it was still standing when the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1837, which is how we know it was there at all. The bank itself survives well, lined with trees along its length, with a particularly sharp, vertical face on its northern side where the fosse doubles as a drainage ditch, drawing water away from the soft ground.

What makes Clonava quietly interesting is that this is not an isolated survival. A similar earthen enclosure, also wrapped around a now-vanished post-medieval house, sits in the adjoining field to the south, and several more of these small farmyard enclosures are scattered across the same marginal ground. Together they suggest a pattern of settlement that probably dates from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when families were farming the edges of boggy land and needed to define their small paddocks and gardens with something solid and functional. A fosse, which is simply a ditch dug to create or reinforce a bank, served here not as a defensive feature but as a practical boundary and drainage solution, the earthwork doing double duty against both wandering animals and standing water. The tree lines planted along the tops of these banks have outlasted the houses they once enclosed, which gives the landscape an oddly persistent quality, the vegetation marking the footprints of lives that are otherwise unrecorded.