The townland name itself carries weight: Leamaneigh, likely derived from the Irish for the elm ford or the elm ridge, places this site in a part of Clare that edges toward the Burren, a region where prehistoric, early medieval, and early modern remains have a habit of turning up in the same field, sometimes almost on top of one another.

An enclosure, in the broadest archaeological sense, is exactly what it sounds like: a defined area set apart from the surrounding land by a bank, wall, ditch, or some combination of these. What such boundaries actually enclosed varied enormously across time, from ringforts used as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period, to ceremonial or funerary enclosures reaching back into prehistory. In Clare, the density of such monuments is particularly high, and the Burren's limestone terrain has preserved earthworks and stone boundaries that elsewhere were long ago ploughed away. Without more detailed information for this specific site, its date and function remain open questions, which is itself a kind of answer: much of what survives in the Irish countryside has yet to be fully examined.