These enclosures, typically circular or oval boundaries of earth, stone, or ditch, marked out sacred ground in early medieval Ireland, often surrounding a church, a cemetery, or a hermit's cell. They are among the quieter categories of monument in the Irish landscape, easy to walk past without recognising what the curve of a field boundary, or a slight rise in the grass, is actually telling you.

Beyond its classification and location, the detailed history of this particular site remains, for now, out of public reach. What can be said is that ecclesiastical enclosures in Clare generally belong to the early Christian period, roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, when the church in Ireland was organised less around dioceses and bishops than around monasteries and the abbots who ran them. Many such enclosures grew up around the cult of a local saint, or were founded by travelling monks seeking solitude in marginal land. The name Cloonnakilla itself is worth pausing over: it derives from the Irish "Cluain na Cille", meaning the meadow of the church, which suggests that local memory of a sacred site here has been preserved in the place name long after any physical structure above ground may have disappeared.