It sits on the map as a classified site, a shape in the landscape that somebody once deemed worth noting, and then, for the moment at least, left largely unexplained.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead during the early medieval period, to later field boundaries, ceremonial enclosures, or the remains of a cashel, a stone-walled equivalent serving much the same domestic purpose. Without more specific detail it is difficult to say which category Ballyeighter's example falls into, though the presence of any such monument in east Galway places it within a landscape that has been continuously farmed and settled for thousands of years. The townland name itself, derived from the Irish, hints at older patterns of land use that predate any surviving written record.