It measures roughly 28 metres along its longer axis and 20 metres across the shorter, and it has spent generations being called, quite plainly, a sheepfold. That label, lifted from an older Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, is almost certainly not the whole story.

The case for something older rests on the Cassini Edition of the OS 6-inch map, published in 1916, which shows the feature as a hachured oval, the kind of marking cartographers used to indicate an earthwork or raised form in the landscape. Scattered across Co. Clare, there is a recognisable pattern: prehistoric or early medieval enclosures, the kind that once defined a farmstead or demarcated an area of significance, were later pressed into service as sheepfolds, their existing banks and ditches making them ready-made pens at no extra labour. The oval at Faunarooska fits that pattern well enough to warrant the classification of possible enclosure. It sits within a multiperiod field system, meaning the surrounding landscape has been worked and reworked across several distinct eras, and the feature itself has a later field wall laid directly over it, compressing whatever earlier form it once held. Whether it began as a settlement enclosure, a stock enclosure of some antiquity, or something else entirely, the ground has not yet given a clear answer.