It belongs to a broad category of field monuments, the kind that can mean almost anything depending on what the ground eventually yields: a raised bank enclosing a former settlement, a boundary marker, a levelled platform with a domestic or ceremonial past. The name Toornanoulagh itself is likely derived from Irish, as most Kerry townland names are, and the terrain in this part of the county tends towards rough pasture and bog edge, the sort of ground where earthworks survive precisely because it was never worth ploughing them away.

Beyond its existence as a recorded monument, the details of this particular earthwork, its dimensions, its date, its relationship to other features nearby, remain unpublished at present. Kerry has no shortage of such sites. The county preserves an unusually dense concentration of prehistoric and early medieval field monuments, from ring forts and cooking sites to standing stones and enclosures, many of them in townlands that saw little agricultural intensification during the modern period. An earthwork in this context might be anything from a Bronze Age boundary to the remnant of a medieval farmstead, and the distinction matters considerably to anyone trying to understand how people organised and moved through this landscape over millennia.