It appears on official monument records, it has been assigned a classification, and yet the substance of what it is, how old it might be, and what form it takes on the ground has not been made publicly available. That gap is itself a kind of quiet curiosity.

Enclosures are among the most common monument types in the Irish archaeological landscape, ranging from prehistoric ringforts and early medieval farmsteads to ecclesiastical enclosures that once defined the boundaries of early Christian communities. A ringfort, to give the most familiar example, typically consisted of a circular earthen bank enclosing a domestic space, used for habitation and the protection of livestock from perhaps the Iron Age through to the early medieval period. Whether the Clooncan example belongs to any of these traditions, or represents something less common, is not yet a matter of public record. Clooncan itself is a small rural townland in Mayo, a county whose landscape holds an exceptional density of such earthwork remains, many of them still faintly legible as low banks or cropmark patterns in the fields.