Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood monument types in the Irish landscape. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farmstead in the early medieval period, to later field boundaries and ceremonial sites whose origins are harder to pin down. Without more specific detail, Buncam's enclosure sits quietly in that wide category, noted and mapped but not yet fully examined.

Mayo is a county with an unusually dense concentration of archaeological monuments, a consequence partly of its relatively low level of later development and partly of the sheer antiquity of human settlement along its Atlantic coastline and bogland interior. Enclosures in this region can range in date from the Bronze Age through to the medieval period, and their condition varies enormously depending on whether they survive as upstanding earthworks, as cropmarks visible only from the air, or as the faintest of depressions in improved pasture. Buncam as a placename has the flavour of an anglicised Irish toponym, though the precise derivation is uncertain, and such names often carry clues about the physical character of the land or its early inhabitants.