The word earthwork covers a broad family of man-made ground features, from prehistoric ringforts and enclosures to later field boundaries and defensive banks, and without further detail it is difficult to say precisely what this one represents. That ambiguity is itself part of what makes it quietly interesting. Ireland's countryside holds thousands of such features, many of them barely remarked upon, their original purpose argued over or simply unknown.

Drumshinnagh is a small townland in Mayo, a county whose boglands and drumlin fields have preserved earthworks that might have been ploughed flat elsewhere in Ireland. The survival of such features in the west often owes less to deliberate protection than to the simple fact that the ground was never intensively cultivated. Earthworks of this kind can range in date from the Bronze Age through to the medieval period, and without excavation or detailed survey, a grassy bank or ditched enclosure may give little away about who made it or why. What is recorded here is the presence of something, a deliberate shaping of the earth that someone, at some point, thought worth marking down.