It is, in a sense, a named absence: a place that archaeology has formally acknowledged but not yet explained.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common and most varied features in the Irish landscape. The term covers everything from the circular earthen banks of early medieval ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to the ditched boundaries of earlier prehistoric settlements. County Clare is particularly dense with such remains, its limestone terrain having preserved earthworks that might have been ploughed away elsewhere. Without further detail it is impossible to say what period Cappagh Beg's enclosure belongs to, what form it takes, or how much of it survives. That uncertainty is, in its own way, part of the interest: the Irish countryside contains thousands of features like this one, recorded on maps and in registers but waiting for the kind of close attention that would tell us who built them and why.