Less celebrated is the fact that the valley also contains a classified archaeological enclosure, a feature that sits quietly in the landscape without the fame of its glittering neighbour.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area bounded by a bank, wall, ditch, or some combination of these, and such features appear across Ireland in contexts ranging from the prehistoric to the early medieval. They served as farmsteads, ceremonial spaces, or enclosures for livestock, and their precise function is often difficult to determine without excavation. The Gleninsheen enclosure lies in the Burren, a limestone plateau in north County Clare where the thin soils and exposed karst have helped preserve an unusual density of ancient monuments. The same qualities that make the Burren an extraordinary landscape for field archaeology, the absence of heavy tillage, the slow pace of change in land use, the legibility of stone structures against bare rock, mean that features like this one survive where they might otherwise have been ploughed out or built over centuries ago.