An enclosure, in the Irish archaeological sense, typically refers to a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and such features appear across Ireland in contexts ranging from the early medieval period to the prehistoric. They could enclose a farmstead, a ceremonial site, a burial ground, or simply a field whose original purpose has long since been forgotten. The fact that this one has a record at all suggests someone, at some point, judged it worth noting.

Shanakeal is a small rural townland in Kerry, a county whose landscape is densely layered with the physical traces of earlier occupation, from ring forts and fulacht fiadh to promontory forts and souterrains. The enclosure there has been assigned a monument number, which places it within the broader national programme of identifying and cataloguing such sites. Beyond that, the specifics, its dimensions, its construction, its likely date, and any associated finds or features, have not yet been made available through public records. It remains, in a quiet bureaucratic sense, a site that is known to exist without yet being fully known.