Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most ambiguous features in the Irish landscape. They may be the earthen ringforts, known as raths or lisses, that served as defended farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They may be earlier, perhaps prehistoric, or later. Without excavation or detailed survey notes, the category label of enclosure is essentially a holding position, an acknowledgement that something circular or subcircular and clearly man-made is there, waiting for closer attention.

Ballykenna itself is a small rural townland, and like many such places in Kilkenny it sits within a landscape that has been continuously farmed and shaped by human activity across several millennia. Kilkenny as a county is well furnished with early medieval and prehistoric earthworks, and enclosures recorded there range from substantial raised raths with visible banks and ditches to low-lying features barely legible at ground level, more apparent from aerial photography than from a walk across a field. Which of these descriptions fits the Ballykenna enclosure is not clear from what is presently available, and that uncertainty is itself part of what makes it quietly interesting. It is a monument that has been noticed and named but not yet fully explained.