Yet this modest mark in reclaimed pasture has a quiet persistence about it: invisible to the surveyors who mapped the area in 1840 for the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, but present, in outline at least, by the time the revised twenty-five-inch edition was published in 1897, where it appears as a circular area roughly five metres in diameter. What exactly it represents remains a matter of careful qualification rather than certainty.

The feature sits approximately 350 metres east of a watercourse that traces the townland boundary with Creggane, in the south-eastern corner of what may be a moated site, recorded separately in the national monuments record. A moated site, for those unfamiliar with the term, is typically a rectangular or sub-rectangular enclosure surrounded by a water-filled or damp ditch, most common in Ireland during the medieval period and often associated with manorial settlement. Within or beside such enclosures, a ring-ditch, a circular trench or the buried remains of one, can indicate an earlier phase of activity, sometimes prehistoric. The ring-ditch at Ballynagoul is defined by a fosse, essentially a ditch, and appeared on Google Earth aerial imagery taken in April 2006 as a circular shape roughly six metres across. By April 2021, it had reduced to a faint cropmark, the kind of subtle variation in vegetation colour or growth that signals buried features beneath the soil surface, visible only from above and only in the right season.

Because so little survives above ground, this is a site for the curious rather than the casual visitor. There is nothing to see at ground level in any conventional sense. The surrounding land is reclaimed agricultural pasture, and access would require landowner permission. The interest here is largely in what the aerial and cartographic record reveals over time, and what it suggests about the layering of human activity in this quiet corner of Limerick, where a possible medieval enclosure appears to contain, or at least neighbour, something potentially much older.