That simple designation, used by archaeologists to describe a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, covers an enormous range of possible origins. An enclosure might be the ghost of an early medieval farmstead, a ritual site, a defended settlement, or something whose purpose has never been convincingly established. The word is, in a sense, an honest admission of uncertainty.

Baysrath itself is a small townland, and like many such places in Kilkenny it sits within a landscape that has been continuously settled and farmed since at least the early medieval period. Kilkenny's fertile ground attracted dense early Christian and later Norman activity, and the county is scattered with ringforts, moated sites, and enclosures of various kinds, many of them visible only as cropmarks from the air or as slight rises in a field that a passing walker might not register at all. Without further detail on this particular site, what can be said is that its presence on the archaeological record places it in that broad, quiet company of earthworks that have outlasted the people who made them without ever fully explaining themselves.