Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most varied features of the Irish archaeological record. The term covers a broad range of structures, from ringforts that once served as defended farmsteads to ceremonial or funerary enclosures of far greater antiquity, and without further detail it is not always easy to tell one from another at a glance. What marks Carrowmunniagh out, in a modest way, is simply that it exists and has been noted, a shape in the ground that someone in the past thought worth defining with a boundary.