The name Gortnaskohoge, from the Irish, carries the suggestion of a small field or plot associated with some long-forgotten personal name or feature, and the enclosure itself belongs to a category of monument found across Ireland: a defined, bounded space, typically circular or oval, formed from earth, stone, or a combination of both, whose original purpose might range from settlement and livestock management to ritual use. Without further detail, the specific form this enclosure takes, whether a raised earthen bank, a collapsed stone wall, or something more subtle in the terrain, remains difficult to say.

Enclosures of this kind in Connacht frequently date to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, though some have prehistoric origins and others were reused across multiple eras. Their presence in a townland is often the only surface evidence of farming communities that left no written record. Gortnaskohoge itself, like many Mayo townlands, would have been shaped by cycles of settlement, clearance, and abandonment, with the famine years of the nineteenth century leaving a particular silence over much of the west. An enclosure surviving into the present in such a landscape has often done so simply because the ground it occupies was never ploughed or built upon, a kind of accidental preservation rather than any deliberate act of conservation.