"Bawn" derives from the Irish "bábhún", referring to an enclosure or fortified yard, often the walled outer court attached to a tower house or defended farmstead. That the word has embedded itself into the place name here in County Kerry suggests that whatever enclosure once defined this patch of ground left a deep enough impression on local memory to outlast the structure itself.

Beyond the evidence folded into the name, firm detail about this particular site is scarce. What can be said is that enclosures of this kind appear throughout Kerry in considerable variety, ranging from early medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads to later bawn walls associated with plantation-era settlement. The county's landscape is scattered with such features, many of them reduced now to low earthen banks or crop marks, their original form only partially legible from ground level. Bawnaskehy sits somewhere within that broad tradition, a named place whose archaeological character awaits fuller documentation.