It exists on maps, it carries a monument number, and it has been noted as something worth preserving, yet the details that would tell us what it actually is, when it was built, and by whom, remain undigitised and largely inaccessible to the casual enquirer.

Enclosures are among the most common and most varied features in the Irish archaeological landscape. The term covers everything from early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, to ceremonial enclosures of far greater antiquity. Without the supporting record, it is not possible to say which category the Ballysallagh example falls into, or whether it survives as an earthwork, as a cropmark visible only from the air, or as something else entirely. Ballysallagh itself is a small rural townland, and Clare as a county has a particularly dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric remains, which makes the silence around this particular site all the more tantalising.