Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features of the Irish countryside. The term covers a broad range of structures, from the circular earthen raths and ring forts of the early medieval period, which served as farmsteads for farming families, to later field boundaries and ceremonial enclosures of prehistoric date. Without further detail, the Doon example belongs to a category of place that is noted, mapped, and protected, but whose story remains effectively closed to the casual enquirer.

The townland name Doon itself offers a small clue. It derives from the Irish "dún", meaning a fort or fortified place, a word that appears frequently across Kerry's placename geography and often signals the presence of an ancient defended site. Whether the enclosure in question is the feature that gave the townland its name, or whether it is a separate and perhaps later addition to an already layered landscape, is the kind of question that the surviving record has not yet answered in any open forum. Kerry as a whole is extraordinarily dense with early settlement archaeology, and single townlands in this part of Munster can contain multiple overlapping periods of human activity, from Bronze Age kerbed cairns to early Christian enclosures to post-medieval field systems, often within a few hundred metres of one another.