Cairns of this kind, which are essentially mounds of piled stone, served various purposes across prehistoric Ireland, from burial and commemoration to boundary marking, though the specific intention behind any individual example can be difficult to establish without excavation or documentary evidence.

Gortnascreeny itself is a quiet Clare townland, and the cairn it contains has not yet been the subject of detailed published description. What can be said is that Clare's landscape holds a considerable concentration of prehistoric monuments, a reflection of the county's long human occupation stretching back thousands of years. A cairn in this context might be Bronze Age, Neolithic, or later; the form persisted across many centuries, making dating by appearance alone unreliable. Without further investigation, the cairn at Gortnascreeny remains one of those monuments that exists on the record largely as a name and a map reference, known to be there but not yet fully accounted for.