The site is recorded as an archaeological monument, which places it in a category that can range from early medieval graveyards associated with a vanished church, to post-medieval burial plots used by local communities outside the parish system, to much older enclosures whose original purpose has blurred across the centuries. Without closer documentation it is difficult to say with certainty which tradition this ground belongs to, though Connemara has no shortage of any of these.

Ardbear itself takes its name from the Irish Ard an Bhéara, meaning the height or promontory of the gap, and the area sits on the southern side of Clifden Bay. The west of Galway preserves an unusually dense scatter of early ecclesiastical and secular sites, a legacy of the region's long habitation and of the relative isolation that slowed the erasure of older landscape features. Small, unenclosed burial grounds in particular were commonly maintained by rural communities in Ireland well into the nineteenth century, sometimes attached to the ruins of an early church, sometimes entirely freestanding, their use guided by local custom and family connection rather than official parish structure. Whether this ground fits that pattern, or represents something older, remains a question that the physical remains on the ground, and any future documentation, may yet answer.