Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most quietly mysterious features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of earthworks, from the circular banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead in the early medieval period, to the more irregular outlines of field systems, ceremonial boundaries, or settlement remains whose origins may stretch back considerably further. Without more specific detail for this particular site, the category alone is suggestive: something was defined here, bounded, set apart from the surrounding land.