Enclosures of this kind are among the most common and most quietly puzzling features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have surrounded a farmstead in the early medieval period, to the stone-walled enclosures associated with early ecclesiastical sites or prehistoric settlement. Without more detailed survey information, the precise form and period of the Belladaff example remain unclear, which gives it a particular quality of openness, a feature that has been noted and named but not yet fully explained.

Mayo is a county with an unusually dense concentration of such monuments, many of them still embedded in rough grazing land or bog-edge terrain that has seen relatively little disturbance over the centuries. The survival of earthworks and enclosures in this part of the west of Ireland owes much to the fact that large areas were never subject to the intensive tillage that erased so many comparable sites elsewhere. Belladaff as a placename likely derives from Irish, with variants of "baile" suggesting a settled place or townland unit, though the enclosure itself may well predate any such naming by many centuries.