These enclosures, typically curving or roughly circular boundaries of earth and stone, mark the original limits of an early Christian monastic or church site. They are among the oldest organised spaces in the Irish countryside, often pre-dating the Norman parish system by several centuries, and their outlines can endure long after every other trace of the community they once contained has vanished into the soil.

Beyond the fact of its classification and location, the detailed history of this particular enclosure remains, for now, largely undocumented in any publicly accessible form. What can be said is that Castletown, as a place-name, carries its own quiet suggestion of layered occupation, and Clare as a county is well populated with early medieval ecclesiastical remains, many of them associated with the florescence of Irish monasticism between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. Enclosures of this type frequently cluster around a founder-saint's cell or a modest oratory, the community growing outward from a sacred centre that was itself often chosen for its proximity to water, fertile ground, or an existing sacred landscape.