The site is classified as an enclosure, a broad term in Irish archaeology that can cover anything from a prehistoric ringfort, essentially a circular earthen bank and ditch that once defined a farmstead or place of habitation, to a much later field or ecclesiastical boundary. Without further detail, the label alone tells us that someone, at some point, deliberately drew a line in the landscape.

Boyogonnell is a small rural townland in Mayo, a county whose boglands and hillsides preserve an unusually dense concentration of such earthworks, many of them surviving simply because the land was never heavily ploughed or developed. Enclosures of this kind can date anywhere from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period, and the more modest among them are easily mistaken for natural rises in the ground or the remnants of later agricultural activity. What marks them out, when examined closely, is the deliberateness of their form, a circularity or regularity that the land itself does not produce by accident.