It belongs to a broad category of monument that could mean almost anything: a ringfort's eroded bank, a field boundary of considerable age, a platform that once supported a structure long since gone. The word earthwork, in archaeological usage, is less a description than a placeholder, a way of acknowledging that something deliberate was done here, even if the precise nature of that effort remains to be established.

Cloonfeaghra is a small rural townland, and Clare as a county has an unusually dense concentration of earthen monuments, many of them survivals from the early medieval period when ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were constructed across the countryside as enclosed farmsteads. Others date further back still, or belong to later periods of agricultural reorganisation. Without more detail attached to this particular site, it is difficult to say which tradition it belongs to, or how well preserved it remains. What is certain is that it has been identified and given a place in the formal record of Irish monuments, which at minimum means someone, at some point, looked at this piece of ground and concluded that it was not simply a natural feature.