That such a feature exists here is itself telling. Kilkenny's landscape is threaded with earthworks of various periods, many of them remnants of early medieval ring-forts or the boundaries of long-dissolved estates, and the presence of one at Ballygowan suggests the land was shaped, at some point, with deliberate intent.

Beyond the bare fact of its existence and location, the documentary record for this particular earthwork is, for the moment, thin. No specific dates, no associated finds, no named historical figures attach to it in the available sources. What can be said is that earthworks as a class span an enormous range of human activity, from the ritual enclosures of the Bronze Age to the bawn walls, or defensive enclosures, that accompanied plantation-era settlement in early modern Ireland. Which of these traditions the Ballygowan earthwork belongs to remains, for now, an open question.