In the floor of the Ballyvaughan valley, on gently undulating land that has been reclaimed into rough pasture, an enclosure was recorded on Ordnance Survey mapping, marked with the hachured lines that cartographers used to indicate a raised or defined earthwork. By the time anyone went to look for it properly, in 1998, there was nothing left to see at ground level.

The enclosure features on both the six-inch and twenty-five-inch editions of the OS map, the former printed in 1916, suggesting the earthwork was at least partially legible in the landscape at that point, or had been noted during an earlier survey phase. Enclosures of this kind in County Clare are often the levelled remnants of early medieval farmsteads, ringforts being the most common, where a circular bank and ditch once defined a dwelling area and its associated outbuildings. Reclamation of agricultural land, particularly on valley floors where drainage improvements made cultivation viable, has erased many such features across Ireland over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here the process appears to have been thorough.