Inis Gé Thuaidh, the northerly of the two Inishkea islands, lies several kilometres west of the Mullet Peninsula and has been inhabited, abandoned, and studied in fragments across centuries. That something was built into its ground, shaped deliberately by human hands at some point in its past, is certain enough to carry a record. What exactly it is, who made it, and when, remains formally unconfirmed in any detail that has yet been made available.

The Inishkea islands have a long human story. Archaeological work carried out on them during the twentieth century uncovered evidence of early Christian activity, including a monastic presence and the production of purple dye from whelks, a practice associated with early medieval communities along the Atlantic coast. The islands were permanently settled into modern times, their last full-time inhabitants leaving in the early twentieth century following a tragedy in which several fishermen drowned during a storm in 1927. An earthwork on Inis Gé Thuaidh, in this context, could belong to almost any period, from prehistoric enclosure to post-medieval field boundary, and without further detail the monument resists easy categorisation. Earthworks as a class cover a wide range of constructed landscape features, from defensive ditches and burial mounds to enclosures around settlements or agriculture, and the island's layered past makes the question of origin genuinely open.