It sits in a county already dense with prehistoric and early medieval earthworks, and its very anonymity is the thing that catches the eye.

An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is a broad category. It can mean a ringfort, the circular earthen bank that once defended a farming family's homestead in early medieval Ireland, or something far older, a Bronze Age or Iron Age boundary whose purpose is now difficult to read from the surface alone. Clare has hundreds of such features scattered across its limestone plains and hillsides, many of them still unexcavated and understood only in outline. Without further detail, Cloongaheen's enclosure could belong to any of these traditions, which is itself a reminder of how much of the Irish landscape remains formally noted but practically unstudied.