Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most quietly mysterious, features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead in the early medieval period, to later field boundaries and ceremonial or defensive enclosures whose purposes are harder to pin down. Without more detail about Ballinorig's example, its precise character remains open.

Kerry is unusually dense with such sites. The county's relatively low level of intensive modern agriculture has allowed earthworks to survive that elsewhere were long ago levelled by the plough. Ballinorig itself is a small rural townland, and the enclosure there is part of a wider pattern of settled and farmed landscapes stretching back at least fifteen hundred years, possibly much further. The specific history of this particular monument, its date, its builders, and its function, awaits fuller documentation.