Such parks were a feature of the great landed estates of the period, serving as both a practical reserve for venison and a visible demonstration of wealth and territorial control. To maintain a deer park required not just land but the labour to wall it, and the walls themselves were often the most enduring thing left behind once the animals and their keepers were long gone.

Deer parks of this kind became fashionable in Ireland during the seventeenth century, partly following English and continental models, and were typically attached to the houses of the Anglo-Irish gentry and aristocracy. The enclosing wall was functional as much as ornamental, designed to keep deer in rather than intruders out, and was usually built to a height and thickness suited to that purpose. The Kerry example dates to the late 1600s, a period when such estates were being established or consolidated in the aftermath of earlier upheavals in land ownership across Munster. The Irish placename suggests the site retained its identity in local memory long after its original function had faded.