At Ballyknock in County Clare, a low hilltop holds a circular earthwork of considerable age, and a modern east-west stone wall now cuts straight across it, with the northern portion of the monument sitting squarely on a leisure course. It is an arrangement that would strike most archaeologists as faintly absurd, and yet it is entirely commonplace in a landscape where prehistoric remains and everyday life have been rubbing along together for centuries.

The monument is a roughly circular grass-covered enclosure, measuring approximately 29 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. Its boundary is defined partly by an earthen bank, about four and a half metres wide and modest in height, and partly by a natural or artificial scarp that rises to around 1.4 metres on the northern side. An enclosure of this type, essentially a ringfort or related earthwork, would typically have served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, though some examples in Ireland are considerably older. What is absent here is a fosse, the external ditch that usually accompanies such a bank, which makes the overall form somewhat harder to read on the ground. There is a ramp entrance at the south-east, though this feature may be of recent origin rather than an original element of the structure. The site was formally recorded as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996.

Visitors approaching across the hill should be aware that the northern arc of the earthwork falls within the pitch and putt course, and that the stone wall bisecting the site is a modern intrusion rather than anything ancient. The scarp is most pronounced on the northern side, where it reaches its greatest height, and that is the best place to get a sense of what the original boundary would have looked like before later activity obscured much of the circuit.