These circular enclosures, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were the basic unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland, serving as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. That this one carries the diminutive suggests it is modest even by the standards of a monument type that was never built for grandeur.

Beyond the name and its general class of monument, the available record for this particular site is sparse. What can be said is that the townland name Brackwanshagh is itself of Irish origin, and that Mayo's landscape is thick with such enclosures, many of them unexcavated and known only as cropmarks or as low earthworks softened by centuries of grazing. A lisheen in this part of Connacht would likely date somewhere within the broad span of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, though without excavation or documentary reference, nothing more precise can be attached to this one.