It belongs to a broad category of field monuments that can range from the remains of ancient enclosures and ringforts to the earthen banks of early medieval farmsteads or the remnants of later land boundaries. The term earthwork, in an archaeological context, simply means any man-made shaping of the ground, whether raised, sunken, or embanked, that has survived long enough to be recorded. That survival alone marks it out from the countless features that have been levelled by ploughing, development, or time.

Robeen is a small townland in Mayo, a county whose landscape holds an extraordinary density of archaeological monuments, many of them still only partially understood. Mayo's terrain, a mixture of bog, drumlin, and Atlantic-facing hillside, has in many places preserved earthworks that elsewhere in Ireland were long ago erased. Without more detailed records currently available, the specific date, function, and condition of this particular feature remain unclear. It may be prehistoric, early medieval, or post-medieval; earthworks of all these periods survive across the county, sometimes within a few fields of one another.