An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, typically refers to an area of ground defined by an earthen bank, a fosse, a wall, or some combination of these, and such features in Ireland span an enormous range of purposes and periods, from the domestic ringforts of the early medieval period to ceremonial or agricultural enclosures of far greater antiquity. What the Ardoley example represents within that spectrum remains, for now, an open question.

The honest answer is that the available record for this particular site is sparse to the point of near silence. It has been identified and assigned a monument number, which means someone, at some point, observed something in this townland worth marking on a map. Ardoley lies in a part of Mayo that has seen human activity stretching back thousands of years, and enclosures of various kinds are scattered throughout the county, many of them unexcavated and understood only in outline. Without further detail, it is not possible to say whether this one is a collapsed ringfort, a field boundary of medieval or post-medieval origin, or something older and less easily categorised.