The name itself is worth pausing on: Garraunnatooha derives from the Irish, most likely incorporating "garrán", meaning a grove or shrubbery, which suggests the land here was once characterised by scrubby woodland, the kind of marginal ground where ancient features have a habit of surviving simply because nobody ever had much reason to level them.

Earthworks of this kind in County Clare range widely in origin and purpose. Some are the eroded remains of ring forts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that were the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, occupied roughly between 500 and 1200 AD. Others turn out to be the remnants of field boundaries, burial monuments, or enclosures whose original function is no longer legible from the surface alone. Without further detail it is not possible to say which category this particular feature belongs to, or how well-preserved it remains. What can be said is that Clare's interior, away from the limestone pavements of the Burren that draw most of the attention, holds a quiet density of such monuments, many of them little visited and imperfectly understood.