The name alone offers a small clue to its setting: Gorteendrunagh derives from the Irish, most likely containing a reference to a blackthorn thicket, suggesting a low, scrubby kind of place, the sort of ground where earthworks tend to survive precisely because nobody has found it worth clearing or ploughing.

Earthworks as a category cover a broad range of constructed or modified landforms, from ancient enclosures and ring forts to field boundaries, burial mounds, and the platforms of long-vanished buildings. Without more specific detail, it is not possible to say with certainty what function this particular example served, or when it was made. Mayo has a dense archaeological landscape, shaped by thousands of years of habitation, farming, and ritual use of the land, and earthworks of many different periods and purposes are distributed across its townlands, many of them still awaiting detailed study.