The name Seanachaidh itself carries a certain weight; in Irish it derives from words associated with old or ancient land, which lends the site an appropriate, if coincidental, air of obscurity.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a broad category: it typically refers to an area defined by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and could represent anything from a prehistoric ceremonial site to an early medieval farmstead or a later field boundary with ritual origins. Without more specific detail available for this particular site, what can be said is that Mayo's landscape holds a remarkable density of such features, many of them unexcavated and undated, their original purposes still a matter of inference rather than record. The county's boglands have preserved some monuments for millennia while simultaneously concealing others beneath layers of peat, meaning that even a modest earthwork can carry a very long history.