That uncertainty is, in its own way, the point.

In 2006, archaeologists from the UCD School of Archaeology opened the ground at Ballinagee as part of a licensed excavation. What they found at the entrance to an enclosure, running through the subsoil beneath the lane, was a narrow, curving cut feature. The shape and position of it prompted the excavators, O'Sullivan and Warren, to suggest it might represent an earlier medieval structure, or possibly something older still, perhaps prehistoric. A curving cut in subsoil of this kind typically signals the remnant of a wall footing, a ditch, or some form of structural boundary, the ground retaining the ghost of whatever was built or dug there long after the material above it has vanished. The ambiguity between medieval and prehistoric is telling: it means the feature does not fit neatly into any one period, and the excavators were careful not to push it further than the evidence allowed.