These enclosures, roughly circular or oval earthworks defined by a bank and ditch, were once the ordinary fabric of the Irish countryside, serving as farmsteads, stock enclosures, or places of shelter across many centuries of rural life. That so many survive at all, even in partial form, is a small accident of agricultural history.

Unfortunately, the historical record for this particular site at Lackareagh is thin, and little can be said with confidence about when it was constructed, who occupied it, or how it related to the wider pattern of settlement in this part of Clare. The county as a whole is well-populated with such earthworks, many dating to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when the enclosed farmstead was the dominant form of rural organisation across Ireland. Whether this example belongs to that tradition or to an earlier or later phase of activity remains, for now, an open question.