Enclosures of this kind can range considerably in origin and purpose, from early medieval settlement boundaries and monastic precincts to later field systems or garden features absorbed into an estate landscape. The fact that one has been formally recorded here, within a demesne more usually associated with the planned elegance of an eighteenth-century landed estate, raises the possibility that the land carries older traces beneath its cultivated surface.

Westport Demesne is the parkland surrounding Westport House, seat of the Browne family, later the Marquesses of Sligo, and the designed landscape dates largely from the Georgian period. The town of Westport itself is one of the few planned towns in Ireland, laid out in the late eighteenth century, and the demesne was shaped in concert with that broader project. That an enclosure monument has been identified within these grounds suggests the area was in use, or at least occupied in some meaningful way, long before the Brownes arrived and began reshaping the land to fashionable taste. Without further detail on the enclosure's form, whether it survives as an earthwork, a cropmark, or a stony boundary, it is difficult to say more about its likely date or function.