That gap is itself telling. Ireland is dense with such features, the circular or sub-circular earthworks that farmers, walkers, and surveyors have been noticing and noting for centuries, and yet a great many remain incompletely described, their origins and purposes still suspended between the obvious candidates: a ringfort, perhaps, which would make it a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, or something older still.

Enclosures of this kind in Kerry tend to be associated with the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when the ringfort, known in Irish as a ráth or lios depending on its construction, was the dominant form of rural settlement across the island. These were not fortresses in any military sense but enclosed homesteads, their banks and ditches marking out a defended domestic space for a farming family and their livestock. Kerry has an unusually high concentration of such monuments, shaped in part by the county's pattern of dispersed rural settlement and the relative durability of earthen and stone construction in its landscape. Whether the Ballynahoulort example fits neatly into that tradition, or represents something earlier or later, remains a question the available record does not yet answer.