Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features of the Irish countryside. They could be the remains of a ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork that served as a farmstead and family compound during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD. They could equally be earlier, belonging to the Bronze Age or Iron Age, or later, associated with post-medieval farming practices. Without excavation or detailed survey, the grass simply keeps its secrets.

Ballynaboll is a quiet Mayo townland, and the enclosure recorded there has not yet been the subject of any publicly available detailed description. What can be said is that Mayo as a county is extraordinarily dense with archaeological monuments, many of them poorly documented, scattered across bogland and upland that has, in some ways, preserved them better than more intensively farmed ground elsewhere in Ireland. An enclosure in this landscape might survive as a raised or sunken ring, visible as a cropmark in dry summers, or simply as a slight but persistent unevenness underfoot that a careful walker might notice without quite knowing why.