The name Boleyboy itself is worth a moment's attention: it derives from the Irish "buaile buidhe", meaning yellow or golden booley, a booley being a temporary summer pasture where cattle were brought to graze and where herders would stay seasonally. That the townland carries such a name suggests a long history of agricultural use in this part of Mayo, and it is against that backdrop of intermittent human occupation that the enclosure sits.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most ambiguous, monument types in the Irish countryside. They may be the remains of a ringfort, a roughly circular earthwork that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period; or they may be older, associated with prehistoric settlement or land division. Without excavation or detailed survey data, it is rarely possible to say with confidence what a given enclosure was, who built it, or when. What can be said is that Mayo contains hundreds of such features, many of them surviving as low earthen banks or subtle rises in the ground, overlooked by those who have not learned to read the land in that particular way.